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The group of people on this forum have continually inspired me by sharing what they are making with their machines. Someone asked me the other day what do people make with their machine and I showed them a bunch of examples but you could see on their face they weren’t satisfied. It made me think they weren’t really asking “what do people make” it they meant “what do they make that they are proud of or care deeply about”.
Maybe you have something maybe you don’t. I’m very curious to see what project you worked on that you are most proud of. It doesn’t have to be something fancy or polished. It could be that you are proud of it because you learned how to do an inlay or it was the first project you every finished or it was your first carve.
Let’s see it what are you most proud of?
I’ll start. This isn’t the post complex project I’ve done but it was the first one I did with the inlay tool successfully. I made it as a present for a friend who had just had a baby. During the project I learned that wood has a pretty high tolerance and if I wanted to get the pieces in and out 0.050" was acceptable. I also learned that you can get a small sample jar of paint in any color in the rainbow at Home Depot for a couple bucks. That totally opened up my world. Lastly while to folks on this forum my little baby sign might not seem complex in terms of the skills required especially if you use the inlay tool to my friend who doesn’t understand what Inventables does it was like I was a magician. They probably asked a handful of times how I made it. It really made me feel good they were so happy and their baby loves playing with it.
This is one of my favorites, it was the largest carve I had done with my new X-Carve; 18 inches across. My old machine was much smaller and I could never do anything this size on it. My wife painted it and it hung proudly on my front door during the holiday season last year.
Mine is the lake map for my Dad. It was the project I had in mind from before I got my X-carve. It was also the first time I used two completely different bits and in the end everything worked perfectly. I learned that in the future I may even need to go to smaller bits as well to grab some really thin spots and the value of many coats of thinned polyurethane.
This was tough. I was asked to duplicate a North Carolina historical marker for the grandson of Burk Bridgers (surfer). Got a lot of advice from forum members to get this right. The State Seal was tough to get that level of detail from MDF and I learned to soak it in a sealer, let it dry and the detail held up much better.
I’m torn between two of recent projects. This was a tablet/cookbook holder I made for my wife’s grandmother that turned out really well with the different colors:
This is a on going effort, in fact with in the last hour I recieved a text saying they have more to be done.
Currently about 100 boards have been engraved.
This one would probably be my favorite project as it had many different facets to deal with from pockets to rounded edges to making the pcb board for the leds to the hole drilling, the switch and all the rest. Everything was manufactured on the X-carve for my friends bar East Village Social (EVS) and there EVS Lager.
I’m proud of this not so much from a machining perspective, although that played a big part, but from a design perspective, it was definitely one of the more complex projects I’ve done, and I feel came out very close to the vision:
