A friend of mine was married in this building, which is the Mormon temple in Bountiful, Utah. I made this as a simple gift for him and his wife. The base is monkeypod wood that was sent to me as a gift from a furniture maker in Hawaii.
Hope he likes it!
Very nice, was that made with just Easel or something else?
Yes, I just used Easel. The image is etched about 0.01 inches into the acrylic, and the base is carved out in two pieces to hold the lights and such, then glued together.
Sweet! What bit did you use? I am planning on a sign in acrylic for my son and have been wondering about that. Great job!
For this one, I just used a 1/32" fish tail two-flute spiral bit. Might not be ideal, and I ran it pretty slow (because I tried running it faster and broke a bit really quickly…), but I used my air compressor to keep blowing the plastic chips out constantly so they wouldn’t heat up and melt into the carving, and it seemed to work pretty well. Good luck!
Do you have a good source for the small strips of LED lights with the power plug?
Does the cut need to be 0.1 inch deep? I was thinking a .003 would be fine, I may need to adjust my thinking.
Whoah, I mistyped above. This image is about 0.01 deep in the acrylic. Yes, using an even shallower cut at .003 inches deep is very likely to work just fine, as long as you are certain your work piece is flat and level to your X and Y axis! As I’m sure you know, if it’s just a smidgen off from level, you’ll get half of your image that doesn’t carve.
Jeremy, I used this kit from Amazon:
Thanks, I have never made an edge lit piece before and I was worried that I was off by a couple orders of magnitude.
Good point about being super flat, the .01 gives a little margin for error.
Any engrave on acrylic will show and i surface the waste board to make sure bit makes contact everywhere I use 1/8" bit from eBay works well also a 1/4" from box stores
0.1 is one hundred thousand of an inch, unless you typo error the decimal point.
0.010 is 10 thousands of an inch
What? 0.1 inch is one tenth of an inch as far as I know. 0.01 = 1 hundredth and 0.001 = 1 thousandth
But I am not a machinist so it may mean something different to a specialist.
1 hundredth of an inch is the same thing as 10 thousands of an inch, is it not? 0.1 is 1/10 of an inch.
You beat me too it.
0.1 is what is called one hundred thousand.
0.010 is what is called ten thousand.
0.001 is what is called one thousand.
And if you go four digits pass the decimal point 0.0001, this is called one tenth of a thousand.
Think of it like if you take a one inch and cut it into a thousand pieces.
Then if you take the one thousand piece and cut it ten times then you have a tenth of that thousand.
I am a CNC machinist by trade, I work with this everyday.
0.1 is one hundred thousandth’s
0.010 is ten thousandth’s
0.001 is one thousandth
that critical “-th” is often not enunciated well in the workplace, yet important in the written word.
Beginner's Guide To Reading Machine Shop Numbers & Values - Machinist Guides
