Oh, man, if only you were closer, Iād share! The eastern red cedar we have all over the place here likes to send out bunches of branches from the same part of the trunk, so itās not hard at all to find a piece like that.
I will share an āafterā photo when itās done. I had to order an extender for my Jacobs chuck so I can drill all the way through the piece before I finish it off. I had tenons turned at both ends so I could drill halfway through from each end, but there was a bark inclusion through the one on the bottom and I couldnāt make it solid enough to hold.
Love your wood turning abilities. So glad you can do your badges on the GF. Thatās one of the things that constantly amazes me about it - the tiny details you can get, either cutting or engraving. Glad you can use the two together!
Thanks! Thatās basically all of the corners and off-cuts from various projects. Itās nice wood and some of it is expensive so I can never seem to bring myself to toss them out. When enough chip buckets get full I fill a mold with the small wood bits. Then when I use resin for some other project and have some left over, I pour it into the chip mold. Between the various wood species and many colors of resin, chaos emerges!
This was the first such item I ever made but the chip buckets are getting full again so I may yet turn a complete place setting - chaos plate, bowl, and cup.
By the way - all that thin stock in the box is leftover from various projects, but it gets used in the Glowforge. This last Christmas I made all our gift tags and a ton of ornaments on the . I posted pix of the tags, I believe. For Valentineās day I cut cherry & walnut hearts out and glued them on the outside of a wrapped package to dress up the plain red paper.
If I want to glue a bunch of those thin strips together to make a pen blank, I laser them to the exact same size and skip all the machining and sanding to square up the ends. I havenāt posted pix of this type of work because until recently I kinda figured if I finished it on the lathe it doidnāt count as āmade on a Glowforge.ā After the last couple of threads it seems like people appreciate this kind of project too. Iāll post the next pen blank project.
What a great use of corners and off-cuts! My dad did a lot of woodworking, and I donāt think he ever threw away any scrap larger than a toothpick. He would have loved this idea. And my mom would have appreciated a shrinking scrap pile.
Iād say the physical nature of the projects you undertake and the tools you wrangle betray a good amount of athletic ability.
No. But at the rate Iām going friends and family are eventually going to beg me to stop giving them stuff. Then Iāll need to figure out what to do with it all.
Thanks for the suggestion! I was super bummed when I tried to put my first few bowls in the glow forge and found they were too tall! Iāve been scratching my head trying to figure out how to engrave stuff in the bottom, so the badge is a great idea! Love it!
I havenāt yet, but I do want to experiment with turning a platter or a shallow bowl with a really large lip and then engraving that
The toughest thing for me has been positioning the pattern on the workpiece. Even after going through all of the alignment advice itās difficult. Engraving on the rim of a platter is particularly tricky because even a small deviation from center would stick out like a sore thumb, even at a casual glance.
To address this Iāve come up with a few positioning tricks. For example, if I want to engrave on the side of a pen I make a bounding box that snugly fits the pen. Then I hold some draftboard in place with honeycomb pins and cut the bounding box out. A bit of masking tape lifts it without disturbing the board below. After that I can drop in the pen and know the pattern will be perfectly aligned.
Problem with thick pieces like a platter is that the laser canāt focus on the bottom to cut an alignment hole and then on the top for the engraving. What I do in that case is place some light card stock on top of the workpiece and engrave the outline on that. Takes a bit of fiddling to get settings that mark the paper without cutting it or marking the workpiece below, but itās doable. Then I reposition the workpiece to match the bounding line on the paper. Repeat until it is perfectly aligned.
In case it isnāt obvious, itās necessary to tape the card stock to the workpiece to keep it from blowing around. Be sure to re-focus when the card stock is removed, too.
Please do post it when you complete the project. Always fascinating to see how people work around the challenges and what comes out of that.
No, I hadnāt. Thatās quite the project! Back when the commercial kits were die cut the only models worth making dies for were ones that would sell in high numbers. And if too many kits were on the market it would be hard to recover the cost if making the dies so the overhead constrained the catalog of what was available for pre-cut kits. It was an artificial scarcity in the manufacturing step.
A consumer-grade laser upends that entire market because without the cost of dies and the machines that use them, itās possible to serve a market in which only a few of any item get made. Glowforge and hobby lasers in general completely eliminate manufacturing scarcity as a constraint.
As a tool for marking and cutting stuff, the GF is pretty amazing. As a tool for prying an entire industry out from under artificial scarcity its even more so.
I love how you made the pen! I have done some segmented work but it was to build a conventional blank which I then drilled and turned as usual. What you did is build a segmented blank except you accounted for the drilling and rough shaping during the segmenting. Cool! And I love the makeshift lathe. Looking forward to seeing the next one.
Iām guessing that would get rid of the blank spots where the letters overlap? If so, then thanks. Iāll give it a try. But if you were referring to something else, Iām afraid you are going to have to throw me the clue stick.
Iāve been trying to carve out more time to learn Inkscape but my current consulting client has decided I need to learn Amazon Web Services and get certified. By the end of every day, Inkscape seems to have fallen off the priority list so itās been slow going. Took me months to realize I had to remove shadow and anti-aliasing on the text. Dāoh! I noticed those little voids but hadnāt gotten around to figuring out what to do about them.
Yes, Union will fix the overlaps. It took me a while to get to the point where the process became automatic. I had a post-it on my computer that read: ā¢ PATH | Object to Path ā¢ OBJECT | Ungroup ā¢ PATH | Union.
ā¦and when I would forget and didnāt want to recut something, an X-acto and thin brown Sharpie works too
Personally Iād love to see a tutorial on how you do that. I have a bunch of scraps from some exotic woods that Iāve been hauling around since 2004. And if you use the forge, it counts!
For anyone wondering what the other side looks like here it is. Approx 10 wide by 3.5 high. This is turned from a burl from a tree my neighbors had to cut down last summer. Those T-shaped features on the right are where the burl grew to completely enclose a ripple in the outer bark. The bottom of the bowl is the outside of the tree so the white streak connecting the T-features is where the tree was growing new sapwood around the defect.
This type of growth is why the grain in burlwood can go in crazy directions, even turning in on itself. For instance, look at the right-most T-feature. Just to its left what looks like a rough patch of wood is actually sanded glass smooth. Thatās end grain showing up adjacent to long grain. If you saw that in moving water you would recognize it instantly as turbulence. This is also turbulence, but manifest in wood and with the corresponding time-scale that it occurs over decades. But if it were possible to film it for a decade and speed it up it would evolve just like a water whorl. Cool, huh?
Thereās a lot more of that burl where this came from. This was literally the smallest piece in the stack. (Also, coincidentally, the driest which is why I chose it.) The yellow circle shows where this bowl was cut from. Iāll try to find on-topic ways to post pix as I use up more of this burl. More bowl badges, maybe? On the bottom far left is a large slab with a huge bark inclusion. Looking at the lobed shape you can almost see the turbulence whorls in motion as the tree grows around the defect.
Love the shape and the colours! I can imagine the smell is amazing. A guy local to me makes feather boxes, he was showing me and they smelt so wonderful. He said he collects the little brown berry things off the cedar trees and chops them up in a food processor, squeezes out the oil and uses that to preserve the wood.