I'm gonna marry in August!

It will be in a wonderful Celtic festival, called "Montelago Celtic festival", in a beautiful and green land located in the middle mountains of Italy. It that takes place every year and it counts 20.000 people and more.

In the past, ancient druids used to carve a celtic spoon as present for their bride. This is a very old tradition that losts in time and losts the true meaning.

It seems that the wooden spoon was a symbol, something to demostrate the husband ability in woodcarving and it reflects in someway his ability in finding food, and making arms; something to demostrate to the bride's family the abilities, needed to mantaind the new generating family.

Nowadays it's obviously just tradition, so I want to do my part.

Step 1: Making the Spoon

Fortunately, I just finished building my homemade CNC, so this is the very first true test for it.

I found some nice spoon drawings on the web and I tried to make my version.

As I don't have yet a good variety of endmills, I decided to build the in two times. the first part is the rough part, made with cnc, and the second part is the refinish of the part with sandpaper, by hand.

Either if the time needed for the cnc part was about 2 hours and half, it permitted me to save up to 5-6 hours of manual work.

The wood was an old piece or parquet, oak wood, approx 25 x 6 x 1 cm.

After a short setup time, I started the cnc job. I worked in two times. Half on one side, and the other half on the other side. I used reference holes to reposition the piece and keep it perfectly in line.

The difficult part was the refinish. First I used a cutter to enhance the joints, which needed about a couple of hours. Then, sandpaper 280 and 400, for 2 hours again.

Step 2: The Happy Result

Here is before and after sanding. I'm quite satisfied as my first woodwork, now I'm going to experiment other shapes and other wood types, maybe cherry or olive.

That piece of oak was a bit pored, so it was a bit difficulty to work with. Next time I will choose e better compact piece of wood, to improve the final result.