All,
Another CNC SIG in the books, & this recap took the scenic route getting to you (that one is on me). The good news: July was too good a meeting to leave unwritten. James was out on family duty, Al joined us from the Zoom side, and a special guest’s show-and-tell turned into the main event. More on that below.
Andrew found a linear pendant light online for his dining table. Then he found the price: $4,000. So he is building his own. He generated a sand-dune texture with AI, carved it two-sided with dowels in his own spoil board to keep the flip aligned, and ran the test piece in Home Depot pine before the real one goes into walnut. The pipeline: Fusion, an AI-written Python script for the displacement map, Blender, then V-Carve. He also uncovered a proper V-Carve gotcha along the way: on a two-sided carve, moving an imported 3D component on one side does NOT move it on the other. You get to reposition it yourself, by hand, and V-Carve considers that your problem.
Steve is building samples for juried street fairs (the kind where a panel of judges decides which makers get a booth): CNC-dished stools made of three glued layers of half-inch plywood, valet trays, and even a CNC-cut jig for welding the stool’s leg ring together. The seat gets a Fusion adaptive pass first (“if you want to get scared,” his words) and a big round-bit finishing pass after. Lesson re-learned in public: a half-inch bit deflects enough that rerunning the same pass audibly keeps cutting, so run it twice. Zach also dropped a line worth writing down, from his own art-show experience: at a juried show, the story you tell as the artist matters as much as the thing you made.
Pete’s pool cue saga hit a real milestone: both locating pins finally came out perfectly round, and the taper cut dead center. Right on cue, you might say. Still on the list: chatter along the full 29-inch blank, which the room diagnosed as the long skinny workpiece flexing in the middle rather than the tool, with a tilted-jig idea queued up for next time. The epoxy pours are also fighting voids, and the group traced the worst of it to a fast-curing epoxy with a very short pot life (Texas heat never helps), though Pete noted slower epoxies have burned him too. He has sold one cue and has five more in finishing. In his words: “I thought the taper was the hard part. The finishing is killing me!”
Brian gave the small CNC some love: he rebuilt the puck using the original one from the big machine, soldered the cord at both ends, and shortened it so it stops popping out of the upper connector. It even still has the dimples from tools past. Battle scars.
Then the main event. Zach Booth Simpson, whose AI talk a few years back kickstarted a lot of the energy this SIG runs on, came back to show us zig-saw.com, the CNC design tool he has been building for three years. He billed the talk as “somewhere between technology and a therapy session,” and his origin story is the most maker sentence ever spoken: “Basically I spent three years automating this so I’d save an hour.”
The idea: CAD is too clicky-clicky. You give zig-saw a picture, it separates the colors into layers, you set each layer’s height, and it hands you G-code. It is very much its own thing (Zach is emphatic: not a CAD package, not a depth-map tool), and the pieces he brought, that layered tree and the Alhambra-style panel, make the case better than any slide could. He is looking for beta users RIGHT NOW. Go to zig-saw.com, make an account, and try to break it. His own instructions: be gentle with him, be brutal with the site. That is exactly why we have these meetings!
A couple of other useful notes from the meeting: there is fresh quarter-inch MDF on the orange rack near the Laguna. Lay a sheet on top, surface it, and use it as your own sacrificial spoil board. It is lighter and cheaper than the three-quarter stock, and the shop’s real spoil boards will thank you.
We also have the July CNC SIG recording here for anyone who wants to revisit the discussion or catch what they missed:
AND, since this recap ran fashionably late, the best part: the next meeting is already here. Next CNC SIG: THIS Sunday, August 2, 2026, 12:30 PM Central, in the Multipurpose Room at Asmbly. 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 question, or just bring yourself!
If you’re attending remotely, the Zoom meeting is here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85372872948?pwd=9iiwluW4UjG8hdR0RKPEApACRYx5jG.1#success
Hope to see y’all there!
@jamesfreeman @SteveW @sneezix @bwatt @cjromb @atwatsoniii @rjnevels @pconklin2000 @Christopher @andrewl