Eventually, the boards started stacking up: Over the past few months, whenever I had some down time where the machines weren't busy with anything more important, I'd have them whittle out more parts. So, after a few hours, Lopez Dos Point Oh and Maria would spit out boards that look like this: I don't have to go deaf and I can still be there to hear if there's anything going wrong with the carving. But due to a recent expansion of the workshop, the screaming machines get their own insulated room. It used to was, I had to just accept the fact that whenever they were running I would either have to leave the room, wear double-layered ear protection, or just count down the days to my inevitable deafness. The Carvewright CNC machines are a bit on the noisy side. Here's the two separate boards that will be carved in order to make the shoulder: It takes a bit of experience to know what will work and what won't, but after a few of these projects, I've developed a knack. Once the model is imported, it's a simple matter of slicing it into piece that the 3-axis Carvewright CNC can actually carve. For example, here's the beginning of importing the lower sholder piece: This plugin allows me to import a 3D model into the program.
What makes it awesome for me is the STL Importer plugin for the proprietary Carvewright Designer software. The Carvewright was originally intended to help hobby woodworkers step up their game by making simple relief carvings into pieces of wood. What you may not realize is that somewhere along the way I picked up another Carvewright which I named "Lopez Dos Point Oh*." Then, about a year ago, I picked up a third one which was dubbed "Maria*." Some time since the arrival of Maria, I also got a good deal on a fourth machine which has yet to be named.
If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you've probably heard me mention Lopez* the Robot Whittler. Instead, the exact right piece of hardware to handle the big parts of this decidedly big build was my team of Carvewright CNC machines. But since most of this build is going to be really damned big, printing everything would end up taking three quarters of forever. For the littler parts, I'm resigned to using my 3D printers. Once I'd completely determined the scale I was going to use, the next step was to turn bits and bytes into pieces and parts. Part 1 (determining scale) is here: LINK.