3D Carving

This is a 3D carving - I bought the actual design of it off Ebay, they just email you an STL file. It was cut out of poplar, and then a mahogany stain+poly was applied.

very nice work!

Looks really good.how long to cut?

It took about 1 hour to do the roughing (1/4 bit on DWP611) and leaving around .20 inches, then 4 hours to do the finishing pass. I used a tapered ball nose bit so it was 1/4" at the shank, and it tapered down to around a 1/16th ball nose bit. Incredible strong bit, and I don’t know if the coating it had on it had anything to do with it - but it’s the sharpest bit I’ve handled (only one to ever really cut me just by handling it so far.) Supposedly those bits can even be used to skip the roughing pass altogether, but I wasn’t going to try that with a hardwood.

I did replace my all thread for a lead screw though and that let me up my Z travel speed to 25mm/s - which makes a big difference with 3D carvings because your speed is limited to whatever your slowest axis is when it’s having to move in Z and X/Y at the same time constantly.