I bought a used Longmill on Facebook MarketPlace. It was in a storage unit for years. All the Delrin rollers needed replacing ( very inexpensive ) I also bought a refurbished Dell computer, with monitor and keyboard, for $168 on Ebay (with 1 year warranty) .
I decided to experiment with making a plaque for my buddy’s 75th birthday. I used the free inkscape software and the free Carbide Create (Version 6) to layout the design and create the G-Code.
I started with a piece of Cherry veneer over MDF substrate. I used UV resin (smoothed with a 6" drywall putty knife) to apply the resin and cure it in the sun for about 5 minutes to prepare the surface. I then applied heavy duty vinyl contact paper (5 mil thick) to the surface before doing the machining.
I had a picture of my buddy and converted it to black and white before importing it into Inkscape. In the “PATH” > “TRACE BITMAP” tab, I adjusted the “brightness cutoff threshold” to generate a pleasing “toolpath”.
Imported that image (along with the text images) into Carbide Create
Machined all of the toolpaths created and made a “stepped” contour outer cutout path.
Sprayed with black lacquer. After drying, removed vinyl contact paper to reveal finished product
@Arbee Welcome to the group! It looks like your off to a good start! I don’t know if your new to CNC work but that was more off a challenge than I bit off for my first LongMill project.
I look forward to see what else you make. If you have questions or troubles there are some really nice folks here that will help if they can.
I am always designing and building things, but mostly “megaprojects” 48 years ago I loved to play air-hockey, but did not want to always travel to an arcade and pay 25 cents a game. I decided to design and build my own table. It is 5’ x 9’ and weighs about 600 pounds. With no design guidance, it took a lot of experimentation to get the holes sized to provide the needed airflow to support the puck. I kept on enlarging/counterboring each hole until proper stable floatation was accomplished. That ended up requiring over 40,000 drilling operations with my trusting SKIL drill! My friend worked for an arcade, so he provided me with a broken pinball machine that I could canabolize to build a score computer. The machine is coin operated and has over 12,000 plays on it. It resides in my gameroom (which I also built by myself)
