Heart CNC Shark Carving

[Jim Krager]

This is one of my first projects on my new CNC Shark, wedding gift for my nephew. Carved in pine and waiting for more coats of Laquer.

I didn't know which forum to post this in, are there anyother Shark users in the Family? This machine combines two of my favorite things, computers and woodworking, it's been a lot of fun.

[Mohammad Madha]

Nice. If this is your first CNC project then I am sure we will see some wonderful projects in the future.

[Darren Wright]

Wow, that turned out great Jim. I've got a home build CNC router. Still trying to find software that makes it easy to create the gcode. Did your machine come with software or are you using something like vcarve?

[Jim Krager]

It came with Vectric vCarve Pro and I bought Vectric Cut3D.

[Jim Krager]

You should see my firewood bin it's getting full, that's why I'm using pine, don't what to burn up some expensive wood until I learn.

[Brent Dowell]

Amazing what those machines can do. I bet there is a learning curve with the software, like everything else...

[Vaughn McMillan]

Very nice, Jim. A CNC rig has been on my wishlist for a long time.

[Rob Keeble]

Amazing Jim. Can you give us some insight into the effort involved once you mastered the programming to get the finish we see in the picture. Vaughn you not alone in that CNC wish list.

[Jim Krager]

First you need to know that I have a long way to go on 3D modeling, so I downloaded the Heart 3D model (you can download free or buy 3D models), the heart was a freebie. Next you upload into Cut3D to create your toolpaths for the 3D model, which most of that is done by the computer, the part of this that will come with practice is setting tool plug rate, freerate, pass depths and stepover. This all depends on the wood type. I went through about 8 foot of pine trying to get this right.

Next step is to import the 3D model into vCarve Pro to add the text this took a little time to get the text to follow a curve.

Then the last step in creating the job is to select a post processor to convert the drawing to GCode that the Shark's controller can understand.

Now the carving begins, I had three toolpaths to run, first a roughing toolpath to remove most of the unneeded wood and then the finish toolpath to do the finished carving and a text toolpath. The carving time was 2 hours and 10 minutes with two bit changes.

Finally I cut it out of the wood with my scrollsaw and sanded and finished.

[Jason Beam]

This is really cool - thanks for sharing it Jim! I'm building my own CNC right now and should be cutting soon.

Thanks for outlining the process - it gives me an idea of how much trial and error there'll be.

I'm planning to use Sketchup and Phlatscript for my 2D gcode generation. I haven't figured out 2.5D or 3D yet - i think phlat can do 2.5, but i'm not sure about 3D.