A buddy of mine had some old reclaimed wood and wanted to use them as a post support in a barn he’s remodeling. He also likes Lord of The Rings a lot and wanted to put a bunch of quotes on the front and back boards. I cut them on my LR4 and it did an amazing job. He put a coat of polyurethane on them and then I cut the words and painted them with an air brush to make them easier to see. Then the excess paint just wiped right off. Here are some pics of the process.
One other thing I did with this that ended up really nicely was I used estlcam to set up different tools that were all the same bit but the gcode for tool changes would denote different chunks of the cut. So a couple quotes would be one tool and then a lower down set would be another tool. Then I used AI to write some NodeJS code to analyze the gcode in between the tool changes and calculate the center point of all of the moves for that tool. Then it would enter the x and y for the tool into the gcode and there was a pause with a probe command in there too. So in between each tool, the cnc would move to the center of the next section, pause itself, I’d do a Z probe and then it would start that cut. It worked really well to deal with fact that the boards were a bit twisted and bowed.
let me know if anyone would like that documented better and I can try to upload the code with some how tos.