I am making a tiki doorbell for a friend. Easy enough, but part of the challenge is that due to where it is going to go it needs to be as thick and I can make it. I was originally thinking about cutting a basic tiki and then making a matching thick back piece to glue it on. But I decided to try to carve it in one go and see how well that worked.
I cut it out of a Redwood 2x6 using a 3" long 1/4" endmill for the rough cut, a 1/4" tapered ball nose bit for the finish cut and the 3" long 1/4" endmill for the switch hole and profile cut (with tabs)
It turned out pretty well except for a chip in the side of the switch hole. I filled it in with some glue and sawdust. And plan to add a bit more once before I stain it.
The basic tiki is the same one I have been using for a while now
This was pushing my machine’s clearance with the long bit. With the way I have the router mounted I had only 6mm clearance between the max long bit height and the wood.
I use vcarve pro and normaly have a safe move height of 6mm and a park position height of 10mm.
I have learned the hard way that this would cause the Z axis to max out and miss steps, throwing everything off. So I reset the safe clearance and park heights to 5mm.
I didn’t reset the z height property when I switched to the tapered bit, so after I did the finish carve you could still see a little bit of the 1/4’ rough cut.
It was an easy fix, drop the Z axis 1mm, re-zero, then re-run the finish carve. It worked great.
Here you can see the chipped out area. If I do another one I will dramatically reduce the hole cut settings (depth and feed). I wasn’t thinking and used my roughing settings, way too aggressive.