We use cookies to personalize content, interact with our analytics companies, advertising networks and cooperatives, and demographic companies, provide social media features, and to analyze our traffic. Our social media, advertising and analytics partners may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services. Learn more.
F-Engrave does do images. You have to save them as .bmp files (black and white) and it has a trace routine built-in. If you don’t like the results, you can also use the trace routines in Inkscape to convert an image to vectors and then save as .dxf.
As far as the types of wood I like for paint fill, the harder, and the clearer and tighter the grain the better.
Maple tends to be pretty good and relatively easy to come by at most big box DIY stores.
Pine is ok if you get a good piece of it, but I wouldn’t use something like Poplar.
Ash ought to be ok too.
I haven’t tried anything like Mahogany or Walnut yet, but I’d imagine they would work pretty well too.
Poplar seals really, really well and has a very nice tight grain and is much better and harder than pine. It carves beautifully as well. It is a good, cheap option. I have a number of exterior signs that still look amazing done in poplar. It does not tint well, however (still better than pine though there are many, many different kinds of pine… )
Fair enough. Maybe it’s the style of poplar that’s available at my local shops, but I’ve never been impressed. It feels as light as basswood or at least, lighter (thus, less dense) than pine, and it’s this horrible shade of brownish-green. I made a couple of early projects with it and it had almost no strength and didn’t look good even when stained.
If I were going to paint it, I might consider it for a project where Pine wouldn’t otherwise work, but for anything where I want to see the wood, I think Poplar isn’t a great choice. Just my 2¢.
Yeah, walnut sounds like a good bet, dunno about white paint though. Maybe go for black paint, and then a non-tinted oil finish to keep the wood from getting darker.
I wouldn’t trust Easel to handle a 27mb file without choking and burning to the ground. I hope you’re using UGS or some other g-code sender for that file.
