Planing a Tree Ring
One of my co workers does wedding cakes and wanted to make a tree section into a cake platter for one of her brides. She got a section of a tree that was being cut down for road work recently, and her husband sliced it thinly enough that I was able (barely) to get it under my chuck. I used my table flattening bit to make first one side and then the other flat. It was so thick that I could not zero on top of it because the program kept trying to take the bit to a safe height of .8". I finally gave up and manually set the initial cut height and then ran passes through the material to get to a low enough height to allow me to run the flattener program automatically. I took it down from 6.31" average height to 5.00" thickness. Knowing she would have to transport the platter, I walso pocketed the back side so that it would shed as many more pounds as possible. The wagon wheel look in the photos may seem symetrical, but it is actually egg shaped to make a relatively smoth transition from one pocket to the next, and to make sure the edge walls would be thick and stable... It was a royal pain in the back side of my lap- but I thought I would post it for entertainment purposes.
Please note that the pockets were only 1.5" deep because that was as deep as I could go and still go back up to the height to clear the edges and walls between pockets. I COULD have reset my bit with each pocket- but it was already midnight-ish and this was a really good looking set up- so I left it at that!IMG_1543.jpg
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Originally Posted by beacon14
