Tall Sailing Ship Carving

Tall sailing ship carving by CNCROi.com was made in this case on MDF that was then sealed and painted for a sharp result that came out spectacularly.

Tall sailing ship carving is done using our ShopBot Desktop, it’s a wonderful platform to do these as the gantry is small and solid, meaning there is zero flex, which produces the best results.

The first pass is done with a larger diameter bit, this is focused entirely on removing material so that the smaller bit doesn’t break plowing through the MDF to add all the very fine details.

This is why you see the results below on the tall sailing ship carving looking so rough, the bit is spinning fast but I’m pushing through this so fast at CNCROi.com that the bit is bending slightly, again, not a big deal, it’s not removing ALL the material, there is some give built-into this process allowing for the finer bit to fix the issues this would typically cause.

What I enjoy about the roughing pass is how fast the results of what will soon come into being are, the details are not fine but they are a very rough approximation of what will happen, it’s like watching a movie on a TV with a resolution of 100 DPI and then doing the same on a 8K one, you know roughly what happened, it just isn’t totally clear until the final pass.

CNCROi.com can also carve out solid surface materials, I just use MDF because it’s quicker or wood because even the hardest hardwood is still softer than solid surface materials.

The final results as you can see below of the tall sailing ship carving is showing a lot of promise, now it’s time to go back over it using a far finer bit, to greatly increase the resolution of the results, and that’s when this will REALLY come into being.

The reason why we use two different bits is because there is a lot of material that needs to be initially removed on this tall sailing ship carving, as a result, using a larger diameter bit is far more efficient to remove the bulk of the material before going over it again with a very small ball nose bit.

You can start to see just how much of a difference moving to a smaller bit does to the resolution, this isn’t by far the smallest bit in our inventory but going with smaller and smaller bits exponentially increases the production time for this tall sailing ship carving.

Here’s the first real dimensional carving I did, it came out fantastic, but MDF is the better way to go for some specific applications because of it’s ease of use production wise.

The process of going with a finer resolution bit is incredibly slow but also the most rewarding, it’s like watching a movie for the second time with glasses that are in focus, you really start to see the power that CNCROi.com can offer when it comes to carving into materials and wood species of all types.

In this case, CNCROi.com was doing a tall sailing ship carving but the image can literally be anything, from a carving of a dog to family photos and anything else you can possibly imagine.

The process of tall sailing ship carving is a very dusty one as well, you don’t see too much of it because the majority of it is being sucked, though not efficiently for filming process, by our vacuum system just above the carving bit.

Paint really makes a huge difference when it comes to what’s possible effect wise by just adding a splash of color and texture to the carving.

MDF is a great material for carving, though we can also work with real wood, it sands very easily, doesn’t have splinters and absolutely loves to be painted with minimal bleeding.

Now that the tall sailing ship carving is finished, you can see how wonderful the results look like after many many hours of CNC routering the design in the MDF.

You can see how smooth the details are and the amazing relief that’s possible using CNC routers to carve out details that just wouldn’t be possible repeatability wise using any other method.

The major advantage of CNC routering out the carving is that of repeatability and scale, this means we can make the same carving endless times at any size the customer wants across a large production run.

There are endless possibilities when it comes to carving, from grapes to ships and anything in-between.

After the tall sailing ship carving is done and slightly sanded, it’s time to liberate the waste material from the part of this portrait I want to keep to then seal and sand at CNCROi.com.

You can really see the design clearly now that everything is ready for the next production process, the details look amazing, sharp where needed, rounded and smooth where needed.

The reason for CNCROi.com sealing the tall sailing ship carving before painting is to make sure that the MDF doesn’t expand in size at the particulate scale once the paint is applied to the finished project.

In this case, the tall sailing ship carving was sealed with gray and already, you can see how the finished design is already starting to pop with the details coming into being far clearer with shadow play.

Just to show you what’s possible, here’s a dragon carving using the same material as we used for this tall ship carving at CNCROi.com.

So to increase the contrast on the tall sailing ship carving, I sprayed it using metallic paint at only one angle, this helps increase the shadows because the reflection is only in one angle while the rest is left with the sealant gray for the best contrast.

I’ve really grown to enjoy carving, it’s quite a steep learning curve but once you got your settings down and get a better understanding of what things need to be done to achieve particular goals, it’s quite fun to do.

Of course, if I wanted even HIGHER resolution allowing far even more detailed carving, I can use an even finer ball nose bit, but you get to a point where production times get so ridiculous that this quickly becomes cost-prohibitive and the details aren’t noticeable to the naked eye at a distance anyhow, so it also becomes a waste of time as well.

I’ve done lots of carving, this tall sailing ship carving came out amazing and I look forward to sharing a lot more of these in the future at CNCROi.com.

Need something carved? Contact CNCROi.com right now!