I’d really love to make my work peeps little gifts and I’m struggling to land on something, but I might make everyone an engraved nameplate for their desks? I’d also love to make all my gifts this year and do Christmas with maximum thoughtfulness and minimum money, so I figured I’d see what y’all have planned to make!…or what you have already made, doing gifts ahead of time like some kind of over achiever 
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Name plates sounds like a great gift! Sadly I didn’t make anything this year.
except 17+ LR4 machines!
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ornaments with booze!
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LOL That’s including the 4 I built in the beta and my personal machine. Last one that was an order for this year left here Yesterday. I leave for work at 0100 so any more that come in this year will be next years LR4’s 
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or is it booze with ornaments?
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After a few i am sure it will not matter.
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Update: I was able to create a DXF of the name plates! Does anyone have tips on carving text with a 45* V bit? I have the bit from the v1 shop.
I created a nice rectangle with filleted edges in AutoCAD and then used Aspire to import my company’s logo and add a persons name as text, and then did an array and changed the names. It actually looks really slick, and I can get everyone’s plate into one piece of stock! I exported it out as a DXF to bring into EstlCAM, and was able to get its automatic function to make the carving paths, which is sweet! Except I realized I know nothing about the carve function nor the v-bits, and figured I should ask the crew while I do some research.
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Estlcam has also got a function where you can import a list and it imports the values for you to make different signs with names etc.:
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V bit carving really relies on how flat your bed and material is. If you are not sure about either, I recommend doing one tag at a time with a Z probe each time. Or you can surface your material, do not move it, then do all the carves at once. Other than that, Carves are awesome.
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Whiskey smokers are usually appreciated (although no one really uses them but hey… :))
You can also try your hand at some custom cutting boards, I think @Tokoloshe has made a few very nice ones
Or some coasters
Or page holders
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This was a great tip, I ended up re-doing the text in EstlCAM and it was nice and easy! Instead of a table, I just created one tag and tiled it a bunch of times, double clicking to change the names. This way I could increase the font size and nudge the shorter names to the middle of the tag’s shape. Not sure if there was a better way to do it, but it worked well enough and didn’t take very long to set up 30 tags though!
This was sage advice! I ran a test batch of 8 tags (left to right), the first few looked great!
Then I noticed the ones to the far right were cut deeper… and then milling the logo was the same story (obvi) but worse because it destroyed the logo, while the deeper text just looked like it was bold or something..
It turns out my table (a rectangle with 3 cross beams, all 2x4’s) wasn’t fully supporting the tabletop, and it being OSB meant that my table was not flat. OSB was all I could afford at the time, but now I have a local place that sold me a 4x10’ 3/4” MDF sheet, and they cut it to my dimensions for $55, so I got a table top, spoil board, elevator plates, and a bunch left over all ready to go 
So yesterday I totally tore down my table and re did the OSB top and junky MDF spoil board! I skipped the elevator plates as I’d had them before, but I never had a need for them, so I have em if I need em.
After putting on the table top, I checked it for flatness and saw that it was bowing down slightly in the X direction (much less than the OSB did at least). To remedy, I took the top off and proceeded to level the cross braces of my table using playing cards and masking tape. It took 2 decks of cards and some scrap wood, but I got ‘er done! Wish I took pics but I didn’t 
This is all a temporary fix so I can get the machine flat enough to make a better table anyways, and it worked really well according to the measurements! The machine was perfectly square on the first go, and there’s less than 1 mm of light gap when I test for flatness with my 4’ level (at least I hope that is flat enough lol).
It also looks way better 
before:
After:
Now to run some more tests to make sure I’m good, but I think it’ll work out 
. The best part is I kept these things a secret, so nobody will be the wiser when they get them a week or two after Christmas lol.
Merry Christmas everyone, this place and the people in it are just the best, and I hope everyone reading is safe and well <3
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