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I am not going to get my X-Carve I do not thing for a few more weeks (probably 3 weeks I am guessing), and I have a customer that is in need of a completed project in the next few weeks. Its a pretty simple job of a bear engraved and then a name and date.
I make customer knives, and I would need this engraved on a dark walnut wood or Dk. Mohogany, or Dk. Maple.
I can have the artwork completed, so it will be ready to convert to svg. It’s a quite small project as most our handles are only 5" x 1.75" and with a thickness of only 1/4" of an inch.
Engraving and Carving is different jobs. Are you sure you want to Engrave on wood. I’m so far Carving Logos, Signs or making small furniture tables with carving decors on it. Never try Engraving which requires additional pin point tools.
Ok maybe I am wording it wrong I just need my image “carved” into the wood. It is a very small job, and I can send exact artwork that you will need. Thanks
Basically I only need 2 pieces, 1 for front, 1 for back. It does not have to have the entire cutout as I show it on knife, as I will do that with my sanders and such when I affix it to the knife. But just retangled piece of wood to cover the knife and the carving area to fit as show with my image. Should be a quite easy and very small cut.
Once I get wood I then drill my pin holes, and rough cut the piece to fit knife, and then glue. Once glued I then go back and sand everything to make beautiful. I hope I explained it correctly, but I only need to carving, not the wood piece cut out or anything, just a piece enough piece of wood to fit over my blade.
Not to throw a wrench into this, but if you plan on shaping the wood after engraving, you will lose the engraving. The engraving needs to go on after the piece is shaped…the shaping and engraving can all be done on the X-Carve.
Erik, The carving is going on the wood and then I am simply cutting it to shape after that. It will not interfere with carving at all. I may do some bit of smoothing with sanding, but i the carving is 1/8" deep it will not effect anything.
So I guess I will ask if anyone is willing to try? I sure wish my machine would come in the next week or two (it will be 3 - 4 weeks then), but not sure have not heard anything yet.
I think you’re going to need someone that’s running VCarve to do that work - you’re going to need a v-bit to get into the finer details of the bear head there. I’m in the middle of switching over to a Dewalt on my machine so I’m down for a bit. If nobody’s picked it up by then, I’ll check back and try to help out.
Thanks Peter, I will take you up on the offer as no one else seems to want to try it.
I am a bit worried now about the purchase of this machine? Are you saying this carving I want is not possible with the X-Carve? I have much more detailed art I want to try and do, but figured I start small like this job.
paired with a 1/8" or 1/16" endmill to clear out the larger space. Right now the free software that Inventables provides, Easel, doesn’t have support for v-bits, although they’re adding features all the time, and I believe that’s on their radar. My suggestion was that this is a good project for VCarve’s line of software, which supports easy conversion of images into cutting paths, and has support for v-bits as well. Here’s an example of a coaster I made a while back, it’s only about 3" across, so that level of detail is comparable to the size of your knife handles, I think.
Without using a v-bit, you’ll have to think about how the machine is going to carve out your image. If you’re using a 1/16" bit, then the smallest curve your image can have is 1/32" (the radius of the bit). Looking at the details of the bear, I’m guessing some of those hair tufts are smaller than that, so that’s why I suggested this approach.
@ErikJenkins’s concern is that you’ll want to round the top of your piece after the image is carved, which would cause the edges of the image to be smoothed away. When I’ve seen knives of this size, it’s fairly common for the handles to be flat pieces of wood, which is what I assume you had in mind.
Well if I send you the actual blade, would that help you determine sizes and full cut? But again the shaping is only the sides, the engraving will only get a smooth sanding.
The carving of the name would be no problem. The issue will be with the fine details of the bear especially around the throat area where there are fine details that would represent his hair I assume. I have some 1/8" 30 degree v bits that do very good but the problem will be trying to maintain that detail when cutting 1/8 inch deep. If it were cut to around 0.02" max it may look good. The shallower the cut with a v bit the finer the detail will be. Cut it to .002 and you would see just about every bit of the detail. If you can post a jpg of just the bear and the overall length and height of it I would do a test cut and see how deep I could go and still maintain the detail.
Well I tried to msg you but I’m not up to snuff on just how that works here in the forum. Just post the pic here on the forum if you like. I can download it and so can anyone else who may want to give it a shot.
You did good Charlie. No problem. Problem is he is not completely open, now to do this job, he must explain a little better. I don’t even know if he wants that carving on flat surface or cylindrical shape like normally knife handle has. Second problem is thickness of the material and stiffness. If stiff enough wood used, of course it is easier to do Engraving. In my opinion.
I thought I explained that earlier, it is flat 3/8" wood (originally was 1/4", but I need to go a bit thicker), a hard dark wood is what I need. I am only rounding the corners when I affix this to my blade. So the engraving (or carving, whichever you call it) will not be effected in my final work.
I will shoot over a jpg image of bear later today when I have access to my home computer. Thanks guys.
I just need my image “carved” into the wood. It is a very small job, and I can send exact artwork that you will need. Thanks
