When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Friday 12 December 2014

Fedex starts to look tasty!

Once the cast sheets were ready, they got taped down to our little Techno, and the parts started coming! I cut all of them with our little 1/16" endmill. The sheets were only about 1/4" thick.
It looks a bit like a burned out scary house at the moment. Because the cut edges were so perfect, in relation to the texture of the sheet surface, I used a small torch to burn the edges. This rounded and textured them enough to look like they were baked in the oven that way!
 With the house, and truck assembled, and the edges burned, I sprayed them up a nice healthy gingerbread color, and we let them dry a few hours before moving on to the decorating.
This was the icing style the art director wanted to see the truck done like. Frosted almost all the way to the edge, with a bit of cookie showing around the edge.
We mixed up the first of an endless batch of royal icing, and I started to ice it. Not an easy thing to do, as the icing tends to set up pretty fast! I have decided that I no longer want to be the Cake Boss. This was a mentally tough job for me, I want everything as perfect as can be, but the truck MUST look like a cookie, so I wrestled quite a bit with perfection vs. cookie. No perfectly straight edges, everything hand done.
The final steps before the logo, was the little headlights and marker lights. All of the candy on this build will be real, to add the "food product" look to these miniatures. Can I tell you how hard it is to find two, somewhat identical, yellow jube jube headlights? They're all bent out of shape, half squished, missing half the sugar coating, stuck together. Oh, it's not all fun and games in our line of work, there are some tough challenges involved. Plus, I had to look very carefully to make sure there was no M&M logo's showing on the marker lights. These are mini M&M's by the way, and the logo is white. I need a nap...........

Once I was happy with the truck, I set it aside for the rest of the day to harden up.
8)
JWO





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