Custom Office Furniture Carvings

[tcooper]

We just finished up another job for a client of ours who was contracted to design and fabricate some custom office furniture for one of his corporate clients. Our portion of the job was just the CNC routing.

All of the furniture is solid maple and cherry and the fronts of all of the doors/drawers were carved with various wildlife silhouette scenes that our client created. The entire job required roughly 260,000 lines of G-Code and took about a week to do all of the graphic layouts, create the tool paths, carve all the doors and drawers and do the detail cleanup. The lateral file drawer fronts pictured took about 3-1/2 hours alone to carve due to the grass detail.

There were several pieces that were larger than the 2x2 carving area on our Shark Pro so we had to break up the carvings and index the pieces through the machine. We also had to account for all of the gaps between the various doors and drawers so the panoramic graphics flowed properly when installed. It was quite the learning experience!

My client's client was really floored with the carving details when they saw the finished product and it sounds like they are going to have him do a few more of their executive offices for them. The next ones should be a little easier now that we've cut our teeth on a project this size. One can only hope anyway...

Troy Cooper

[Michael Rytter]

THAT is really impressive!

[hdtheater]

Most impressive! Can you tell us about your indexing system?

Eric

[tcooper]

Thanks Michael and Eric.

The indexing system was pretty straight foward as it was just a narrow straight edge that I clamped to one side of the clamping table just at the edge of the carvable area with an alignment mark on the straight edge denoting the 0,0 point. That would then allow me to carve the first 2'x2' area and then slide the piece down along the straight edge to reindex it. I had tick marks on the piece being carved (based on where it needed to be positioned for the next half of the carving) which would then get lined up with the 0,0 mark on the straight edge.

When laying out the graphic files I allowed about a 1" overlap between the two carvings so they would flow together when carved since I was using a 90 degree v-bit to do the outside edges of the silhouettes and I also needed the pocketed area to flow together as well. The most difficult part was really creating the carving layouts in V-Carve and accounting for the necessary overlap in the carving files.

This was much more challenging that I originally anticipated since the maple doors were actually oversized by 1/4" on each side so that there was extra material to allow for potential tear out since the carved pattern needed to go right up to the edge of the doors. I also had to account for the 1/8" gap that would exist between the doors and drawers once they were installed so the graphics would look right and flow through the gaps when installed. I must have done the various layouts three or four times before I was able to get everything to line up properly.

Unfortunately, the graphic layout process will be different depending on the particular graphic(s) being carved and just requires methodically thinking through how it all needs to come together in the end and, in my case, lots of trial and error to finally get things to work our right. Now that I've done it once I know it's possible but it's like starting a completely new puzzle with each similar job that requires indexing.

It's probably going to take me a few more jobs like this to figure out what layout tricks develop that translate regardless of the graphics being used so I may try to provided a more detailed explanation at some point in the future... time allowing.

I hope that explanation helps a little anyway.

Troy

[GARYR6]

Great work even if it makes me feel amateurish when I look at the work I do my shark.
However, Inspired, I have started working on a new cupboard with just such a design.
Here;s hopen I do as well.

[hdtheater]

Thanks Michael and Eric.

The indexing system was pretty straight foward as it was just a narrow straight edge that I clamped to one side of the clamping table just at the edge of the carvable area with an alignment mark on the straight edge denoting the 0,0 point. That would then allow me to carve the first 2'x2' area and then slide the piece down along the straight edge to reindex it. I had tick marks on the piece being carved (based on where it needed to be positioned for the next half of the carving) which would then get lined up with the 0,0 mark on the straight edge.....

Thanks Troy for the explanation. I have been thinking about just putting down a straight edge down the Y axis with a ruler engraved into it. I like your idea better by incorporating the X,Y 0,0 point into it as well. I have been using the center as my 0,0 position and I think I might make fewer mistakes if I go to the upper left right of the work piece instead.

Eric