High-heel, clipless bike shoes

Step 4: Finishing

Finishing was lengthy. Since I was insensitive to the grain while planning my toolpath, there were chunks of wood that had been pulled out by the cutter in the machining process (it remains unclear to me whether climb or conventional milling is better). I filled these with epoxy.

For the sanding, I started with a pneumatic angle die grinder which is an amazing tool for finishing almost anything – it is lightweight and powerful. Following this, there was a lot of manual sanding. Still more sanding and ever more sanding.

Finally, when things looked reasonably smooth, I propped the shoe up on the tips of drywall screws and painted on a thin layer of epoxy. I made a mistake here and added some mico-ballons to the epoxy to increase the viscosity for filling voids in the wood. This has the undesirable effect of replacing the voids with small white dots… ugg.

After more vigorous sanding of the epoxy layer, we sprayed the shoes with a layer of Polyurethane which made them beautiful… do not skip this step.