I unabashedly “borrowed” the design concept for this left-shaped jewelry box from Blake Weber, a popular YouTuber. Blake was kind enough to give me permission to use it for some boxes I want to make as gifts for family members and close friends.
Being the CNC newbie I am, I managed to code in some erroneous toolpaths, resulting in some mistooling at the perimeter. But I learned quite a bit from that experience which will be put to best use when I go to make the next one.
This photo shows the second screw-up: inadequate clamping, which in turn allowed the wood to shift. Fortunately for me, I believe it only happened at the very end of the job, so I think I can resurrect this part by making the lid for it conform to my coding error (described in the preceeding paragraph).
The great thing about this is that I learned so many things from doing what is my most complex piece to date.
@ApexWoodworks It looks like we have something in common, Marty. We learn the hard way and from our mistakes. I’ve made so many mistakes with the Long Mill that I should be the definitive expert in its use. I am far from it, of course.
With your firm base in woodworking, I’m sure that you’ll figure this stuff out quickly.
One thing that I think that I saw in this project is that it looks like the profile cuts were burning the wood. It looks like this may be cherry, which burns if you look at it crossly, but you can get quite good results with appropriated feed and speeds. FWIW.
The burning happened in only one area, and looking back at my toolpath instructions, for some reason I set that to a climb cut, which I’ve found from my woodworking experience, is more likely to cause burning. But it could also have been what you pointed out, and that is that I may have had an improper speed set on the router. Additionally, it probably didn’t help that the bit was getting dull by that point, as I’d been using it for the practice projects I’d been doing up to this point.
