Category: CNC
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I Built a Mid-Century Modern Nightstand
When I was tasked with making a 31″ tall nightstand for my mother-in-law that would fit in a 9″ wide space next to her bed and provide drawers and a shelf. I decided to use the opportunity to try a furniture style I haven’t tried before: mid-century modern. From what I can tell, “mid-century modern”…
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COVID Christmas Ornaments
Inspired by a picture my wife sent me of almost this exact same thing, I made some COVID-themed Christmas ornaments for the family members I won’t be seeing at Christmas this year. You can make your own too, if you have an X-Carve; the Easel project is right here.
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How to use your router to install your router lift for your other router
I bought a JessEm Rout-R-Lift II router lift for my shop. It needs to be recessed into a workbench, but it doesn’t come with a template for cutting an appropriately sized hole. You can buy an MDF template for $27, or you can do as a I did, and make your CNC router carve the…
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I Built a Custom Closet System
My daughter’s closet was just a 4′ x 5′ space with two hanging bars and a shelf, which was not an efficient use of the space. If I had taken a “before” picture of this project, you would be able to see that, but I didn’t take any pictures until I had ripped out the…
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I’ve Got Hives!
Beehives, that is! I’m going to be keeping bees this year, and I built and painted my own hives. One is an ode to Lincoln: One is a rainbow honeycomb pattern: And one was an attempt at a foggy mountain scene: I hope the bees like them. I think they are the bees’ knees!
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Secret Santa 2018: Japan in Maple and Walnut
For my workplace Secret Santa gift exchange this Christmas (you know, the one that very recently took place), my recipient was a Japanese citizen who likes to hike, so I made him a 3-D topographic map of Japan out of maple and walnut. The steps to build it were pretty simple, so I won’t caption…
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Generating and Cutting Halftone Images on the X-Carve
Halftone is an app I’ve written for making halftone-style carves with Inventables’s Easel CNC design platform. A halftone image uses different sized dots to represent light and dark areas. Upload an image, and Halftone will convert it to a grid of holes with each hole sized to reflect the brightness of the image at that…
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I Made a Truly Simple Pencil Box
I made this sliding-top pencil box for our three-year-old goddaughter. It’s all Baltic birch; the sides are half-inch and the top is quarter-inch. I carved the design with my X-Carve, painted the carved area, and then finished the entire box with a spray enamel clearcoat.
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8-Bit Emergency Kit
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wished you could escape from your problems? Well if you had this 8-bit emergency kit, you could grab the hammer, smash your way to a P-Wing, and fly away. For the uninitiated, the hammer and P-Wing are items from Super Mario Bros. 3., one of…
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I Built an Infinity Wishing Well
A few weeks ago, my wife mentioned that she’d like me to find something to cover the septic tank cleanout in the front yard. I had strategically placed a bird bath next to it two years ago, but I guess people were still able to see the pipe. Where I’m from, when we have a…
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Introducing the Fintendo: My Bartop Arcade Build
I have fulfilled the greatest dreams of my childhood and built an arcade machine that plays my favorite games from the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and more. There are many very good tutorials on the Web on how to build your own bartop arcade, so I won’t be going into a ton of detail. I mainly…
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An Automattic Bowl
For part of the gift I sent through the Secret Santa exchange at work this year, I decided to make a bowl with the Automattic company logo inlaid in the bottom. I’ve never made a bowl or done an inlay before, so this was definitely a wise decision that would not backfire. I started by…
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I Made Some Animal Stools
I made four little animal chairs for young family members this Christmas: The process for each chair was basically the same: cut out sides on the X-Carve, cut the seat and seatback on the table saw, and screw them together. I hand-painted the elephant and unicorn, and I finished the whale and otter with Danish…
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Making Name Puzzles with the X-Carve
For a couple of the younger kids on my Christmas gift list this year, I made name puzzles with my X-Carve. The puzzles are made out of Baltic birch plywood; the letters are 1/4″ thick and the base is 1/2″ thick. I cut out the letters of the name (and some additional puzzle pieces) with…
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Turn Your X-Carve into a Plug Cutter
One of my favorite aspects of Inventables’s X-Carve CNC router is Easel, their free online carving software. My favorite part of Easel is that it is programmable — you can write apps for it. Apps automate tasks like turning an image into a puzzle, carving gears, or making inlays. Inventables has written nine apps and…
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Today’s CNC Carving: A towel rack that says Towels
What do you hang your towels on? A plain old towel bar? Ha. A hook on the back of the door? Sad. You drape them over the shoulders of a mannequin like a cape? Ok that’s pretty cool. But what would be even cooler would be to hang your towels on a towel rack that…
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Garbage Can Cabinet Medallions
Ever since I built our garbage and recycling cabinet last year, visitors to my home have been mystified as to where to throw away their trash, so I made some identifying medallions for the front of the cabinet with my X-Carve. They’re carved out of red oak (the same wood used for the top of…
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Functional Print and CNC Carving Mashup: Mini Air-Hockey Pucks
In today’s Don Rickles news, I 3D-printed and CNC carved some mini air-hockey pucks. We were given a mini air-hockey table this week, but it didn’t have any pucks, and after buying some at Walmart, we learned that the table didn’t use full-size pucks. After five minutes in OpenSCAD and half an hour of machining,…
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I Made the Bower Power Industrial Tripod Fan
My wife came across this DIY tutorial from Bower Power on how to make your own industrial-style tripod fan, and she loved it. Of course, what my baby wants, my baby gets: I cut the tripod center on my CNC router because I still need to justify its purchase. Leave a note in the comments if…
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Artisanal CNC-Carved Growth Chart
My kids have been requesting a growth chart, so I made one with my X-Carve. I used red oak left over from when I built our dining room table. It took three separate carves to get all six feet of numbers and inch delimiters carved since the X-Carve’s workable area is only about 30 inches…