All,
September was the month the dinosaur came to life! Last month it was a much smaller version; this time the full size one was standing in the corner. The Steves also kept introducing themselves until somebody finally said “I’ll have to change this to the CNC Steve meeting,” and then all three of them went on to present completely unrelated projects. So, I guess they aren’t exactly all the same…?
James brought his junior CNCer back, his own little mini-me, Luke. Luke was having a lot of fun at the bench and we enjoyed having him with us. The best time to start makers makin’ is in the womb but we don’t blame James for waiting till he could walk.
The Steve building a fireplace surround is doing it in old longleaf pine, and found the molding toolpath in VCarve along the way.
If you have never used it: you draw a cross section profile, click a line or a square or a circle, then the molding tab extrudes that profile along the path.
The Steve with the Etsy shop brought catch-all trays cut from reclaimed white oak. He has a show coming in a couple of months and is short on stock for it, which is its own kind of deadline.
Somebody planning the same kind of pocket asked about deep reach bits and got the warning of the day. The cheap ones snap in the middle, because it is weaker steel with a lot of leverage, so bore most of the pocket out with a normal end mill first and spend the money on a decent collet so the long bit is not already wobbling before it touches wood.
Shanda’s dinosaur is ALIVE! Foam, with foil tape for reinforcement and spray foam holding it together, which is very sturdy, actually. Brian helped her at the machine for the cutting, which is exactly the standing offer he made in last month’s recap, which is awesome maker teamwork in action–this is what these meetings are all about!
The finish goal is photoluminescent, because obviously. She is working toward two dates: Halloween, and October 5, which came up in the room as the final day to register to vote.
Brian wrote a VCarve gadget similar to Gridfinity, a standard grid that lets storage bins line up and lock together, and it is normally all 3D printed. Printing gives you the positive shape; doing it on the CNC means cutting the negative baseplate, and that is what his gadget generates for you.
He is sharing it with us here: Asmbly Projects | 1Fifoto
Grab the .vgadget file, then in VCarve go to Gadgets, Install New Gadget, point it at the download, and it shows up under Gadgets as Gridfinity Baseplate. His slide deck from the meeting is on that same page, along with a rotary CNC converter and a squareness calculator, so it’s worth a scroll even if drawers aren’t your thing.
Andrew plugged in a wall sconce and it was super cool! It’s a 2" thick board with a two sided carve, a wave surface that looks like a sand dune + an LED strip (unseen from the front) glowing up the center. It was amazing.
He built the basic curved shape in Fusion, then used AI to generate a displacement map, which is just a grayscale image where white means high and black means low. Blender applied that map onto the face, and he had AI write him a Python script so he could play with the amplitude and the randomness of the waves until it looked right. Incredible work.
A couple of other useful notes from the meeting:
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If you hit set XY origin on the controller and it throws an error, look at the top right of the screen. If it says machine mode, you cannot set your XY zero, because machine mode is reading where the router physically is relative to where it homed. Press menu and 1 at the same time to get into workpiece mode, then set your origin.
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For foam and plastics, use a single flute O-flute. Two flutes halve your chip size and the foam needs chips big to clear itself. On acrylic that second flute leaves serrations along the edge that you cannot sand away the way you would in wood.
We also have the September CNC SIG recording here for anyone who wants to revisit the discussion or catch what they missed:
Next CNC SIG: Sunday, October 4, 2026, 12:30 PM Central. Come early for the Laser SIG at 11:00 AM (CO2 lasers, Michael’s crew) and make it a double-header. Bring a project, bring a failure, bring yourself!
Cya guys then!
@jamesfreeman @SteveW @sneezix @bwatt @cjromb @atwatsoniii @rjnevels @pconklin2000 @andrewl @michleon100