Carving Grapes: MDF Routing
I’ve grown quite fond of CNC carving, the capabilities are incredible… and today we’ll be carving grapes out of MDF just to show you how smooth a result CNCROi.com can achieve.
About 95% of the work involved in producing these custom carvings is actually not shown in the videos or the pictures in the blog posts, it’s software based, if the carving looks good in the software, then it looks good in real life.
The material being used for carving grapes is half inch or 12 mm thick MDF, it machines fast, has a lot less cleanup than using hardwood or softwoods and is plentiful – I got lots of scraps in the shop from various jobs we’ve done in the past!
That being said, whether CNCROi.com demonstrates a carving using MDF, hardwood or softwood, the carving is the same, the parameters such as feeds and speeds may differ based on material but the actual result is the same, carving is carving.
Most of our carving jobs aren’t as exciting as this, generally signage for various industrial and retail applications.
I’d say the biggest difference between carving MDF vs other materials, including solid surface such as Corian, is the chips, with MDF, it looks like grains of sand while everything else, it looks like peeled chips.
The results of carving grapes right now doesn’t look like anything special, all jagged and it’s hard to make-out what’s going on but that’s the purpose of the initial carving bit, get material out of the way for the fine ball nose to back over it and turn things beautiful.
Now that the initial material clearance is complete at CNCROi.com, the next step is our 1/8″ 3 mm ball nose to go over the entire carving, VERY SLOWLY and carve out all the very fine details found in this carving grapes project.
Of course, if you want something on your wall that’s not only unique but crazy durable, we can also cut metal!
Grapes have vines and leaves, so of course, CNCROi.com is also carving that out, there is waste material on this job that I’m leaving put because I want to use this as a showcase for people to see what our carvings look like before we go ahead and finish them with paint etc.
Line by line, our ball nose carving bit is slowly transforming rough looking carving grapes into something that looks good enough to eat at CNCROi.com.
The X you see in the above picture is my bit reference, as my ShopBot Desktop doesn’t have a tool changer, I have to manual do so and readjust the Z-axis between bits to match perfectly, that’s where I do it.
CNCROi.com does carving using a variety of techniques and machinery, each one has a plus and minus.
You can see now how the carving grapes is starting to look, fantastic!
As carving effects are heavily influenced by lighting, depending on the angle, that’s the details that pop out to you, which makes these even more special is the tactile feel of running your fingers over carvings, it’s quite different than a flat photograph or printed materials.
CNCROi.com has carved a lot of jobs, and this is quite a fun experience to do things that otherwise would be out of reach and budget for most people and businesses as traditionally, this type of work would take YEARS to master by a dedicated craftman.
Other types of carving possible at CNCROi.com is actually performed using our CNC laser.
I’m cheating using a CNC to produce amazing carving results for our clients, the talent for CNCROi.com is in the programming, not the hand-eye coordination, a skill that would take lifetime to learn properly.
The depth of the carving grapes from top to bottom is just slightly less than half an inch, I needed to have a somewhat solid backing as this will go on the wall and I needed something sturdy.
No matter how many times I look at this, I’m always amazed by how incredible this carving looks like and what’s more amazing, is that this result would be the same whether it was Oak, Cherry, Walnut or anything else you have a budget to handle.
No carving is complete at CNCROi.com without a self-portrait to kick things off!
The massive advantage of carving at CNCROi.com is volume, each one of these carving grapes can be the same or different, in size, composition or any other variable, and no coffee breaks are needed by our CNC machine, so it’s straight production.
Now that carving grapes is finished at CNCROi.com, let’s take a look at the completed results from various angles so you can get an idea of what we can achieve and how the carved MDF looks like as light hits it from different angles.
Keep in mind that CNCROi.com can also perform reverse carvings, meaning what you see in this photo would be reversed, meaning you’d feel the negative of this image rather than the positive, similar to a lithographic effect.
Carving grapes was fun, I got a whole pile of tests I want to do using our amazing carving machine, of course, if you wanted something bigger, CNCROi.com also has a full sheet machine that do spectacular work.
Need custom carving? Contact CNCROi.com right now!