What is everyone working on?

Okay everyone,
I know I'm not the only one using my handibot, show us what you are up to.

This:

[www.youtube.com]

I've also been working on some of the digital wood joints. I'm not quite done with them though.

Boat Numbers!

Any of you who are boaters will know that states require the display of one's registration numbers on both port and starboard sides of the bow of one's boat. These are almost always really messy and ugly because people are forced to use hardware-store decals to accomplish the lettering. They tend to never get aligned correctly.

My little sailboat needed new numbers because the previous owner lived in MD and my boat is now registered in NC. It seemed like a great opportunity to try the new Handibot Large Material Indexing Jig and maybe get some better looking numbers at the same time.

I cut the letters in 1/4" ColorCore (like Starboard) material that had 3 layers of plastic, white-black-white. Because the long number board was almost 28" it required 5 tiles across to do the lettering and cutout of the board. The shorter board took 4 tiles.

I did it all with V-Carve Pro, but I was sort of obsessive in doing the edges with a v-bit and the pocketing with an 1/8" end mill -- that is, this was a v-carve with flat bottom. I wanted to use the v on the sides so that edges would be sloped to retain as little debris as possible. I'm not sure how much difference that will make. It would have probably been fine to just pocket it all and use the single 1/8" cutter. It would have been a lot faster and I would have avoided having to do the tool changes (I, of course, did not have enough sense to combine both boards in one long continuous project which would have meant only one bit change.)

For hold-down, I just put a couple of screws through the jig and ColorCore, and into my workbench below, then used 4 tabs to hold the boards for cutout.

The pictures of the project are here. I will attach the boards to the boat with an oval-head, stainless screw and raised washer at each end where there is a pilot hole.

Images on Google+

It seemed to come out pretty well, though in a couple places I was able to detect the tiling location because the junction was not quite perfect. But given it was all manual and I did not do a particularly good job collecting the chips, I was pleased with it. Doing it again, I would have used less step-over (50%) because there was a little bit of fluff in some areas that did not get trimmed away ... and of course, set it all up as one long project.

Ted Hall, ShopBot Tools