St George 3d carve

I’ve finally finished my St. George medallion carving and am quite happy with the results.

The wood is pine with a Danish Oil finish. For the final pass I carve used a 1.5mm ball nose bit with a step over of 0.2. A step over of about 0.1 would likely have been better, as I had to do a fair bit of cleanup with a dremmel and some sanding. Its probably at the limit of the detail that pine can hold. If I was doing it again I’d either use a hard wood or make it bigger.

You can find the original 3d mesh here. I did re-model the meander (the squiggly bit around the outside) so that it could be carved with a 2mm bit.

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LOOKS GOOD! My winter project is learning how to do this.

I’m thinking of going into 3d carving. Still in the process of reading lots of posts about it. What bit(s) did you use?

Thanks!
3d carving is not too hard to learn unless you want to model your own meshes. You will need a CAM program that can do 3d carving, like Aspire or CamBam (don’t know if Easel can do 3d).

Also handy is a mesh editing program for cleaning up and modifying meshes. I trimmed the squiggly design around the outside from the original mesh and remodelled it to suit the bits that I had. Autodesk Meshmixer and Mesh Lab are free and pretty good.

For the 3d carve I used the following bits

  • 12.7mm (0.5in) ball nose router bit, for roughing passes
  • 3mm tapered ball nose bit for semi finish passes
  • 1.5mm ball nose bit for finishing passes

I did 2 passes with each bit, 1 across the wood grain and 1 along it. Doing the along the grain pass second might help to hide cutting marks. YMMV.

For the meander (the squiggly bit around the outside) I used a 2mm upcut end mill. While for the walls I used a 3.175mm (1/8 in) upcut end mill.