Peter.Steele

This is gorgeous. Sadly, my CNC router isn't big enough to make it the size of yours... but I could easily do a scaled-down version. Might use Celtic knotwork for the motif.Hm. Wonder if I have the plywood on hand...

Gotcha, thanks. Good luck with your redesign. Hope it comes out well. I've redesigned my spindle mounting a few times. Took a while to get things really set nicely the way that I wanted them.On the zero below surface, that's a thing that I do sometimes as well, especially if I want to paint the letters in but use a clear varnish on the surface of the carving. I'll set the zero to 20-30 thou deeper than the top face, cut everything, paint it, then go back over it and face off the surface.

Okay, so, this is criticism, but it's not meant to be mean-spirited.What happened with the shape of the letters? V-carve toolpaths should be crisp and clean. The Playfair font has clean lines, but the letters that came out of your router are amorphous and jagged. You can see where each of the lifts / plunges / direction changes happened. Does this come from the software? Or is it something to do with flexibility in the spindle mounting or something else with the hardware setup?The attached screenshot shows what I mean. When you look at the areas that I circled in read, you can see places where the cutter didn't retract far enough (the tail end of the 'e' for instance) or where it carried on too far in a direction without lifting up (the arch of the 'n', the tops of the 'v' and 'y', and ...

Okay, so, this is criticism, but it's not meant to be mean-spirited.What happened with the shape of the letters? V-carve toolpaths should be crisp and clean. The Playfair font has clean lines, but the letters that came out of your router are amorphous and jagged. You can see where each of the lifts / plunges / direction changes happened. Does this come from the software? Or is it something to do with flexibility in the spindle mounting or something else with the hardware setup?The attached screenshot shows what I mean. When you look at the areas that I circled in read, you can see places where the cutter didn't retract far enough (the tail end of the 'e' for instance) or where it carried on too far in a direction without lifting up (the arch of the 'n', the tops of the 'v' and 'y', and several other places), and where it didn't go deep enough, or took 2 separate shallow paths rather than one deep one, and left extra material behind (the center of the 'g').

Jesus, dude. You are my new hero. I would have had a tough time getting that done right and I've got a CNC mill in my garage. Color me thoroughly impressed.

Yeah, but you spent more time making the jigs than you did on the cutting, I bet!Still. Doing it with hand tools? That's damned impressive no matter what jigs you had.

Okay, nice. Your mill was sold by Grizzly, but it's one of the more common benchtop mills out there. One of the earliest - possibly the original, I don't know - of that type was called the RF-30, made by a Taiwanese company called Rong-Fu. Look around on Google for Rong-Fu RF-30 CNC conversion kit. You'll find plenty of stuff available to buy off the shelf, or you can find the plans and make the mechanical parts yourself and buy all the electronics.It's really a pretty easy conversion to do.

If you have a mill already, you do NOT want to do it this way. The cuttin forces that you're going to see are going to be far, far more substantial and you'll stall out these drivers and motors the very instant the first flute of a cutter touches metal. What model grizzly do you have? There are conversion kits and detailed DIY plans available for almost any Grizzly product you're likely to ever buy.