Category: X-Carve
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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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What do bees from Silicon Valley make? Kumail Nanjihoney
Made with my X-Carve Halftone app.
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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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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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Wooden’t You Like to See These Christmas Gifts I Made?
Here are a couple more Christmas gifts that came out of the workshop. The first one is a wall-hanging for my die-hard Vikings fan mother-in-law. I cut it on the X-Carve and hand-painted it. This one is for my parents to hang up pictures of the grandkids: If you’re wondering whether making a sign like…
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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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CNC-ing a Stepstool out of a 1×12
My wife requested that I make matching stepstools for our hall bathroom so that the smaller children could reach the faucets. I used the opportunity to design a stepstool that could be carved out of a 1×12 and assembled in minutes. I used Inventables’s Easel software to design a stool that would be 12″ tall…
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Today’s CNC Carving: A Chisel Rack
In today’s “new meets old” news, I’ve used my CNC router to carve a rack for my chisels. I designed the rack in Easel, Inventables’s CAD/CAM software, which only took a few minutes. The chisel holders are just circles superimposed on rectangles to allow each individual chisel to fit vertically in the rack, and the…
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Today’s CNC Carving: Doll Bunk Bed Insert
My wife and I decided that we were spending far too much money on factory-carved objects, so we bought our own CNC router — a 1000mm X-Carve from Inventables. I finished setting it up today, and the first carving on the agenda was a replacement insert for my daughter’s doll bunk bed: The bed broke…