Spooky Season

Update - we did the other 3 this weekend. They were actually easier to deal with than I thought and I wound up not having to make them out of multiple pieces.

I did wind up having to redo the CAM on them because for some reason I thought the foam came pre-scored in 18" widths but it’s actually 16" Oops.

I think I may have skipped a toolpath on the D by mistake…whoops.

And all painted and in the yard:

I had enough foam left over I decided to finally make my wife the XL chainsaw murder cat she requested. The very first thing I cut on the machine was a small plywood one that’s still over our back door. But the files I found included a few other options like kitty with a cleaver and chainsaw. She really liked the chainsaw and wanted a big one for the front yard to lurk in the bushes. But she wanted it BIG so I knew I’d have to cut it out of multiple pieces. And didn’t feel like figuring out how to do that yet.

Well, with enough foam left over yesterday I decided it was time. It’s “ok” but I’m not happy with how it came out:

I had to cut it into 5 pieces to fit the foam/machine. There has to be a better workflow for it than what I came up with. The files were STL’s so I had to convert to vector outlines…And I had to figure out how to cut it up. I considered a couple of software options but settled on Fusion since it’s what I’m most familar with - but man was the workflow tedious.

I started by doing a sketch with a box for the overall dimensions I wanted and layout lines every 16"…I then changed them to ever 15" because I wanted a bit of wiggle room on the 16" wide pieces of foam.

Next I imported the STL and converted it to a solid. Then using that first sketch I cut the solid into separate bodies which I then created sketches from projecting the body into the outline which I was finally able to export as DXF. Bleh…so many tedious steps.

And didn’t like the results. The 3rd cut wound up too far to the right where the wrist was so it was a weak spot to join two pieces - and the saw was too tall to fit on my machine anyway…and had a little piece cut off that would have been a pain to re-connect.

So I shifted the cut over making the main cat body narrower so I had a nicer spot to join the two pieces - and cut the saw in half to make it shorter and fit on my machine. The biggest pieces were 34" tall which used almost every bit of space I designed into my machine in Y.

And that worked - but…cutting the wrist/lower chainsaw piece the power cord for my router got snagged and caused it to miss some steps :frowning: I didn’t know WHY it missed steps so when I went to cut the next piece it ALSO missed steps which was when I finally spotted the problem. So the chainsaw has a notch in the tip. The first piece that had flaws I want to recut…but don’t have any big enough pieces of foam left and didn’t feel like going back for another 4x8’ sheet of foam (They also sell 2’x2’ pieces but that wouldn’t have been big enough without adding yet another cut which I didn’t want to do either.

So - it’s not perfect…my wife still loves it. But I want to redo that one section next weekend.

The plan is to join the pieces, paint it black, put some red cellophane behind the eyes and light it from behind with a spotlight.