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.

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Dead is heading out!

Jody and I got to enjoy the Canadian long weekend, which was a lot fun for us. It did make me a little late posting the tombstone final build though!

 Once our scenic mud had dried (or almost) we spent a bit of time removing some of the texture. As great as I though it looked, it was a little too pitted to pass as a real limestone headstone!


I used Aspire and our Techno to V-carve the text portion onto the front side of the stone. This was done with a high spindle speed, and low feed rate. I didn't want the thin coating on the styrofoam to chip out. A little was okay, but too much would have been very bad for this! In the end, it came out as perfect as I was expecting.

We used 2 coats of the same color glaze to add a little depth to the otherwise flat finish.
The final step was to add 2 gentle passes of speckle paint to all the faces in a very dark grey.

I couldn't help setting up on the lawn at the shop for a couple of quick pictures! I really wish it could have been old, and dripping with weathering, but the script called for a brand new stone :(
It looked really good, and surprised the neighbor when I asked for help lifting it onto the table!

All in all, it was a fun 2.5 day build!
I'm already drawing up different versions for everyone on my 'list' MU-HA-HA!
8)
JWO

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