3d roughing question

[Chuck Keysor]

Hello Shopbot Friends:

In designing the 3D cut files for a large Victorian house decoration, I began to wonder, how do you determine how good of a 3D rough cut you need to make? (Conversely, how crummy/quick of a 3D rough cut can I get away with?)

I ran one 3D rough cut simulation for this big part with a 65% step over, (and .25" per pass) and the simulation said it would take 2 hours and 13 minutes. The 3D finish pass took 3 hours and 22 minutes.

Then I ran the same 3D rough cut simulation except with a 30% step-over, which raised the simulation time to 4 hours and 25 minutes. I didn't change the parameters of the 3D finish pass, and it's simulation time remained unchanged.

I took screen shots of both sets of 3D finish simulations, running at highest modeling resolution (7x slower) and I carefully compared them. I couldn't see any difference in the end 3D finish cut. IE, it appears by the Aspire simulator, that the 3D rough cut does not even affect the end quality of the 3D finish cut.

So why would anyone bother to run a 3D rough cut with any detail? And how big of a step over can you go on the 3D rough cut before something does show up as being fouled up in the 3D finish cut? How can you tell by simulation that you have made too rough of a 3D rough cut? Or does the simulation even reveal problems related to the 3D rough cut, that do show up in the real cuts made on my Bot?

Sorry, lots of little questions, but they are all related to the nature of figuring out how to correctly choose a minimum 3D rough cut strategy.

Thanks, Chuck

IMPORTANT PS: When I ran the actual part, I kept the big 65% step-over, and the wood was rather splintery, and in places, I imagined that with a smaller step-over, I would have had less splintering of my stock. But none of the splintering was so bad, that it busted through "machining allowance".

[adrianm]

The important thing to realise is that the finish cut is always to the full depth required to finish the model in ONE PASS. It does not use the pass depth specified in the database.

It's just something to be aware of if you leave too much material behind on the roughing pass the usually delicate finishing tool can have too much to do and snaps.

If you're cutting in something like foam you can often get away with skipping the roughing pass entirely and dished models can often be cut with a finish raster path without using a roughing pass.

[Burkhardt]

For very deep carvings I rough only with a step depth of the finish bit flute length minus the skin. Even if the finishing bit is very fragile, the stepover is usually so small for finishing that it can handle a full flute length cut.

For shallow carvings than don't go deeper than the finish bit flute is long, I don't rough at all.

However....I make sure that the very first cut starts outside the wood in air or is above the surface because cutting that first full width/depth trench will likely break a slim bit.

DeskProto has more options than Cut3D to define layered finish cuts or to do a rough cut in a narrow strip as as starting slot.

If your model has deep holes or pits with steep walls that are smaller than the roughing steps, the roughing pass will ignore them. You are then running the risk that the finishing bit will plunge at full speed into the wood in these locations. I broke a few bits that way but don't know yet how to avoid.

[khaos]

... However....I make sure that the very first cut starts outside the wood in air or is above the surface because cutting that first full width/depth trench will likely break a slim bit. ...

Don't miss this KEY info.

[Brady Watson]

Don't miss this KEY info.

Ed Zachery.

Do a profile pass before or after roughing, before your finishing pass. Leave some meat by not going full depth so you have one continuous tab of sorts around the whole thing. This saves cutters & your sanity - since it will reduce or eliminate that horrid screeching noise at the end of each raster pass. If the part is conducive to it, I carpet tape or vacuum it down & then remove the scrap material from around the part before roughing and finishing. This also saves tools as long as your hold down is rock solid.

It isn't uncommon for me to run 4 or more toolpaths on a 3D part in order to get the quality and finish I want. An extra 2 minutes of cutting to clear out for the finishing makes a big difference. Additional toolpaths are pretty much manditory in denser materials in order to keep the tip on the tool.

-B

[shilala]

I just wanted to comment on the end of your post, Chuck.
Soft wood will get butchered pretty bad without reasonable feed/speed. So will hardwoods. It likes to chip rather than pile up.
I keep stepover under 20% all the time. But I also keep the depth of my model within boundaries that I've found work best in different woods.
I always figure that saving an hour of machine time isn't worth losing the whole project. It always takes a lot more time for a do-over. :)

[Chuck Keysor]

Thank you everyone for providing very useful and educational replies to my questions on 3D roughing!

Adrian, I had wondered about the 3D finish cut pass depth, as there is no setting for that in the cutting parameters. That observation actually sent me astray in my thinking as to what might be going on. So your concise statement that Aspire will calculate the 3D finish cut in one pass without regard for how much material is above the finished surface was very clarifying for me!

G., your suggestions on when to make a roughing cut, and how deep to make them was also very helpful!

Thanks Joe for emphasizing the key bit about having the bit start its cut in air.

Brady: I assume Ed Zachery is Japanese English for exactly,,, I scratched my head the first time I read that. :confused: The second time I said , Ah so!
Your suggestion of doing a profile pass makes sense to avoid the above issues. And I had noted the screeching of my bit at various moves which made me a bit nervous at first.

To your point of multiple finish passes, I first did a raster finish pass, moving with the grain, over the entire piece at 1.5IPS (figuring that since that is the fastest I can move without problems in my V-carving, why should 3D finishing not have the same limit?) with my 1/16th inch tapered ball nose end mill, at 10,000RPM, with a step over of 32%. That took 4 hours! That is why I chose such a big step over. Then I went back over key areas where hand cleaning up would be most difficult, and did an offset finish pass. That was fascinating to watch, and amazing to see how precisely the bit tip lightly touched the already cut surfaces, barely leaving faint marks. Effectively my step-over was much finer with the two usually non-parallel tool paths. I spent 7hours and 45 minutes doing finish passes.

Scott, my wood was pretty butchered! The wood is from South America, and is called heura crepitans (I have no idea what the spelling is). I had thought of shellacking the entire piece after the first 3D finishing pass, to help with the fuzz, but decided not to, as this was a first time type of project.

Coming:
There are 4 separate carved Victorian "appliques" in this project. I will post pictures of this piece, along with one of the other 4 appliques that I cut out of blue Styrofoam with a request for material suggestions. The blue foam cut great, the wood was really crummy. I'll keep and use the wooden one I am now finishing by hand. But that leaves 3 more to go, that I could make out of other material. I will save that though for the next post.

Again, thank you all for your greatly appreciated replies to my questions! Chuck

[khaos]

When I 3D finish my stepover is 4-8%. Granted it does take longer.

[shilala]

Chuck, that stuff sounds super soft. Like down around 600.
I keep a pretty comprehensive list of wood hardnesses. I choose my wood for projects based on those hardnesses, or "pressure to mar".
I find that I like to work with woods that are around 900-1100. They tool really nice for 3d applications. Once I get into red oak and things that are hard and open-grained, the chipping is awful, unless the 3d features are nice and smooth and flat and rounded.

My point is, if you can select your crazy south american lumber with hardness and shapes in mind, you'll save tons of grief. The cool thing is that lots of South American woods are in the mahoghany family, and the range of hardness goes from moosh to nice, and lots of them look the same.
So you can easily match a look, even if you don't use the exact type of wood a customer requests. I find that folks will easily defer to a suggestion, especially when I let them know "it'll look much the same in the end, but this wood will give you a much nicer piece".

I find that if I match the right wood with the right feeds and speeds, I can get done a lot quicker, and I don't need a bunch of sanding and lacquer to fix things up.
I'll do damn near anything to avoid sanding. :D

[Brady Watson]

To your point of multiple finish passes, I first did a raster finish pass, moving with the grain, over the entire piece at 1.5IPS (figuring that since that is the fastest I can move without problems in my V-carving, why should 3D finishing not have the same limit?) with my 1/16th inch tapered ball nose end mill, at 10,000RPM, with a step over of 32%. That took 4 hours! That is why I chose such a big step over. Then I went back over key areas where hand cleaning up would be most difficult, and did an offset finish pass. That was fascinating to watch, and amazing to see how precisely the bit tip lightly touched the already cut surfaces, barely leaving faint marks. Effectively my step-over was much finer with the two usually non-parallel tool paths. I spent 7hours and 45 minutes doing finish passes.


Chuck,
Every relief is different in terms of what stepover and diameter tool I choose for finishing. I absolutely hate sanding & would rather let a robot do as much work as possible than for me to aggravate my arthritis. Typically I run 8-12% on a 3D finishing pass, with 6% being the lowest & 20% being the highest - unless I was doing the 3D finishing pass as part of a roughing strategy. I may run 35% SO with an 1/8" ball before finishing with a 1/16" @ 8-10% SO. It is highly dependent on the material and the relief.

Simulating the 3D toolpath is your friend. In most cases it will tell you what bit you want to use by running a few different toolpaths selecting incrementally larger or smaller tools as you go. There is certainly a diminishing return when running smaller tools on larger reliefs & you have to weigh whether or not it is worth it to you.

I'm not sure what relief you were cutting, but it may have made more sense to finish the entire relief with an 1/8" or 3/16" ball & then go back over areas you isolated with a vector to machine those areas with the 1/16" ball. In either case, you'd probably want to run 10% to get a nice finish. Just remember to Zzero at the EXACT same spot you zeroed out your first tool on the material. I just write the location on the material or spoilboard.

Got any pics of the piece in question you can post up?

-B


PS - those small cutters like high RPM. Crank that spindle up to 18,000, especially in soft materials and watch your quality go up. I routinely run 18-20k with tools 1/16" and less.

[Chuck Keysor]

Sorry, this took a long time, as I wanted to finish fixing the "Victorian applique" by hand before I started to write.

Note, total machining time for everything was 11 hours 30 minutes. Total time to repair (hand sanding, chiseling, filing, floor mounted spindle sanding, Fordham Mototool grinding, and rasping!) was 10 hours and 5 minutes. And truth be told, I'll probably mess with it some more. But this, and its 3 mates are mounted on the outside of a two story Victorian house. But, if I could have made it furniture quality in 10 hours of hand work, I would have done that! I don't like making things that are bad when looked at up close, even if they will not be seen up close after installation. But the level of finish I got by hand, is what I wish I could have gotten off of my machine. I will have to make a number of posts to get all the pictures in. But first, I will answer some unanswered questions.

Joe, I think my stomach turned when I saw the machine time shoot up at smaller percentage step-overs. I was guessing/hoping that the sanding wouldn't be so bad, never imagining it would take 10 hours and 5 minutes!.

Scott: The crazy South American wood was provided to me by the contractor doing other work on this house. He bought a two car garage filled with 8' by (1' to 2') by 2" clear planks of this heura crepitans. It has good weather resistance, and he has actually used almost all of it up on local jobs. I know this won't help much but this wood is somewhere between white pine and Douglas fir in hardness. And it can fuzz terribly. But I have 3 more appliques to make for this job, and the contractor has said he will purchase other material as recommended by this forum, if the forum doesn't say that the problems I had weren't all related to my 3D rough and 3D finish settings.

Brady: Honest, running with the top resolution (7X slower), the simulation did not show any of the fine surface hatching that I got, the vertical profile cutting marks, and of course it didn't show any of the crazy curling spirals of fuzzy wood! Do I have to run in the super resolution mode to see the first two problems? (I recall this from a training video, requiring that you hold down ALT, or something like that? I do have a new fairly graphics capable PC, with a EVGA/Nvidia graphics card that has I think 3 gig of onboard video ram.)

I was originally going to use a 3/4" or 1/2" core box bit for the first 3D finishing pass, and then use "rest" machining with my Amana 1/16" tapered ball nose end mills, and you suggested I'd be better off skipping the first finishing pass, and just do the entire thing with the 1/16" bit. As I don't have a broad collection of bits yet, I had two of the Amana tapered bits in 1/32", but nothing in between those two and the core box bits. And since the simulation I got with the big 30% step-over looked OK, I just went with that.

I did have a marked reference point just outside of the cutting area on my blank, which I used for zeroing all of my bits for each operation.

And somehow, I settled in on 10,000rpm for my V-carving (that seems kind of similar to 3D finish machining). So it hadn't even occurred to me to alter the speed, which would have been pretty easy to do, especially since I spent so much time standing there at the Bot watching......:eek: I'll run the next job up at 18krpm-20krpm!

As far as cleaning up, one area that was terrible, were the vertical surfaces. The way the 1/16" bit crawled across each horizontal surface, and part-way down the sides, I could watch it cutting groves on every vertical surface (with my 30% step-over.....). I was thinking that at least my final profile pass to cut out the part would wipe these out on all of the outside edges. Well, the profile pass did eliminate the vertical marks left by the 1/16" tapered ball nose endmill, but it made even WORSE vertical marks, as shown in pictures 9 and 11. The vertical lines were murder to get rid of (or to minimize I should say). I ran my profile pass with a 1/4" spiral upcut bit, running at 10,000 rpm, 3IPS, taking 1/4" passes, as conventional cuts. These same marks showed up on the blue Styrofoam piece as well.

The resulting mangled mess which is shown as the edge detail (picture 7) was unimaginable to me, it turned out so bad. In the simulation, it was a nice little molding profile detail. Picture 13 shows my attempt to salvage this with my hand-held Fordham moto-tool. Would that have turned out OK with a 10% step-over? Again, it looked fine in the simulation. Or should I do that type of detail with a 2D tool-path?

I will post all the pictures in chronological order, and spread out over however many posts it takes. There is a limit of 5 pictures per post.

The last pictures show what I first cut out of blue Styrofoam. This part turned out looking like the model, except for the vertical marks on the profile pass (as noted above). I did no touch up, EXCEPT, it quickly hit the grooves with a file, feeling the detail was too mushy. If the wood would have turned out half as good as the foam, I would have been thrilled! Then I would have only had to sand out the fine ridges. I use the same step-overs, speeds and bits for the Styrofoam that I used for the wood.

MY HOPE, is that I can get recommendations as to:
a) what settings I should change to clear up this mess. (Actually multiple messes........)
b) logical material options if settings and cutting strategies do not seem likely to correct all of my problems with this funny wood. (I am leaning towards PVC based upon many posts saying it machines well, paints well, is bullet-proof strong, won't rot, won't warp, and is much cheaper than HDU. The remaining 3 parts in this set are 1.25" thick. One is 36" x 24" and the other two are 15" x 22".)
c) recommended settings for whatever material is recommended!

Thank you all again for any help you have offered, and any more that you can provide! Chuck

[Chuck Keysor]

Here are the next 5 pictures. Pictures 6 and 7 show the initial raster 3D finish pass, followed by a follow-up offset 3D finish pass. The resolution would seem to have gone way up, but the quality didn't really improve. The raster and offset cuts were both made with a brand new Amana 1/16th" tapered ball nose end mill with a 31% step-over, running at 1.5IPS.

Picture 8 shows the part before any touch-up, except I had vacuumed up the debris, and used my hand to knock off some of the junk that was still attached to the wood.

Picture 9 shows the back side of the part, before cutting out the bridging. The purpose of the picture is to show the poor quality edge left by my profile pass (detailed in previous post). Thanks, Chuck

[kevin]

I'm not as technical as Brady

It looks deep for a shallow carving I think your taking to much material it would take me 2 hrs tops

Stay away from 3d roughing its a waste of time .I use a 1/4 first then a 1/8 great results no sanding or rasp

If you must go that deep first use 3/8 same setting for 3d finishing

Its really that easy leave step over setting to default

[Chuck Keysor]

Picture 11 shows the combination of the raster and offset 3D finish tool paths, plus the bad quality profile pass. These same brutal hack marks also show up on the Styrofoam, in the next batch of pictures.

Picture 12 shows the tools I used to clean up by hand (for 10 hours 5 minutes). The Porter Cable profile sander worked great where it would fit in. Where regular sand paper left fuzz, this tool left a smooth surface. I also used some really sharp chisels, and a Fordham Moto-tool. The tool I used that was also helpful, but not shown, is a floor standing oscillating spindle sander.

Picture 13 shows the crummy hack job I did to repair the edge detail. I did this with a free-hand Fordham Moto-tool..........

Pictures 14 and 15 show the clean detailing offered by a sharp X-acto knife.

Chuck

[Chuck Keysor]

The two Styrofoam images show what I got right off the Bot. It had the little surface tooling marks, and I ran at 1.5IPS, 30% stepover. This turned out great without any surface touch up after taking it off the Bot, except I spent 1 minute to emphasize some of the grooves with a file. AND I had the bad profile cut-out tool marks (running at 3IPS, taking .25" per pass, cutting in the conventional mode).

The last picture shows the house that the 4 "appliques" I am to make. I have made the biggest one using wood which goes over the second floor porch, the focus of this post. The smallest appliques are on both sides of the attic window on the left side of the house. One of those I have test cut from Styrofoam, and that one is shown in this post. The other two parts are fully modeled. I am hoping for guidance before moving on to cut out the remaining 3 parts.

This is the photo I had to work with, except the original is pretty high resolution. But much of it involved guessing where I simply couldn't see the details.

Ironically, the easiest thing to model would have been the sunburst, but the customers didn't ask for that. Someone made a really bad replacement maybe 15 years ago, where as the ones I am making, are completely missing. Maybe later I can do the sunburst!

Thanks again to anyone who has taken the time to read this, look at the pictures and offer comments! Time to eat! Chuck

[bleeth]

Chuck:
I have done 3-d projects that took 24 hours to cut and still needed sanding.
There is no way you can get a close to smooth finish on something like that with a 30% stepover. For the size of those pieces I would likely end up using either a 1/4" or tapered 1/8" ball nose. Step-over would be more in the range of 7-10%.
Depending on the actual depth I may hog some out with a roughing path and I generally use a flat bottom end mill for that. It does go fairly fast as it can have a larger stepover.

[shilala]

Chuck, if you put a zero plane around that model, or each component of the model, it'll clean up those edges really nice.
You can do real short offset pass around the edges to clean stuff up, too.
If you'd have run a 1/4" ballnose with a short stepover before you took it off the table, it would have cleaned up a lot better for you, too.

Somewhere along the way there's a tick box for using a large diameter bit for clearing large amounts of material. A 1/2" ballnose would make short work of that and give you something real close for a 1/4 ballnose to work on.
There's so many things you could do that'd make that gorgeous piece a more resolute in the end, and so much less work on you, and take a lot less than the 10 hours you spent cleaning her up.

You're very close, and it turned out nice in the end.
You got tons of great input, too. If you get to make this again, I bet you'll see a world of difference in the whole process.
The pics were a big help. Well done, brother!!!

[Chuck Keysor]

Thanks Kevin, Dave and Scott for your great feedback. This is just a quick note, and I will get back later. But I did want to make the point that I will be shortly using the feedback I get, because I still have to fabricate 3 more appliques, though they are not quite as large as the first one, they are still big. So not only will advise be appreciated, it will be used in short order!

The attached image shows on the right side is what I tried to model, shown closer than the earlier image, and my model.

It was confusing to model something that I couldn't figure out what it was! The bottom half is clearly acanthus leaves, but the middle seemed like maybe a torch, but not enough to be convincing, and since the other appliques on the house had abstract upper halfs, it seemed out of character to zoom in on this thing and make it clearly look like a well defined torch. So it stayed amorphous and a bit mysterious!

Later, Chuck

[kevin]

Chuck I didn't realize how big they are it would take me longer then 2 hrs

But I would keep it a little rough so the paint can take would only finish with 1/4

I'm still learning .The next time you'll have an easier time

[Chuck Keysor]

Hello Shopbot Friends:

Sorry, I was planning to post this completed Victorian house applique picture last week, and didn't get to it. I was busy working on the 2nd of the 4 appliques for this house. (I will cover the 2nd applique in a new post.)

In total, this Victorian house applique took 11 hours and 30 minutes of machine time, and almost 17 hours of hand work. (The hand work is sanding, chiseling, filing, epoxy filling, priming and painting.) Even with all the hand work, the results are only good enough for hanging up on a house three stories up in the air. But if I had to make this (or something similar) nice enough to hang on a living room wall, making it furniture grade (which I had hoped I could do), it may have taken another 5 hours of work. :(

Thanks again to those of you who offered tips and suggestions, as these were of benefit to me in making the second Victorian applique. Chuck

[Joe Porter]

You're way too hard on yourself, chuck. That looks pretty good to me, even up close...joe

[Chuck Keysor]

Thanks Joe, I appreciate your feedback.

I have a friend of mine who is always telling me about things I make, "Chuck, its not furniture!" But it seems I can't change my thinking. It seems as though everything I do is a learning project, and even if something doesn't NEED to be perfect, I want to try and make it that way, if the case arises where I do have to make something that is perfect.....:o

Thanks again, Chuck

[Justin G]

I do 3d carving almost exclusively. This does not make me an expert, but I have spent a solid year (I know this is nothing compared to most of you guys, but its all day, every day full time for me) breaking bits and throwing parts, and evolving my hold down, spending 10 hours on sanding and hating life and having my carvings go from "oh thats neat" to "whoa thats nice" and spending 10 minutes on sanding. Its amazing what these machines can do. Funny thing is, they (almost) always do what you tell them.
The couple things I see in your work, if I had to guess, and guessing I am, is most importantly, your vector lines for your profile pass are probably not smooth. If you node edit your profile vectors that you use for cut outs and see 10,000 black squares instead of 30 blue squares, you're going to get **** edge quality from the machine bouncing around between those nodes. It will also take a lot longer and the machine will sound a lot rougher. On the same token, did you take your model into the sculpting function and smooth it out? Don't rely on the general smoothing tool which can be helpful, but can also make your model look like a giant blob, but by "hand." Going back and forth to really blend everything in nice but still retain the detail? Did you set up your material size so that it is just outside of your model, to maximize the pixels concentrated on your model instead of empty space? This allows for smoother toolpaths more than most other things I have done.

Brady is right as rain about the profile pass around the model. During my tool path setups, I calculate my model roughing using a 3/8th" hogger/finisher and see what depth it cuts to MAX. I use zero offset boundary and always rough across the grain. Because the roughing will raster back and forth, if you rough with the grain you will be switching between conventional and climb cutting, and I find that climb will often cut LONG shards of wood off and splinter extremely poorly. Going across the grain will achieve more chips. Then I toolpath a separate profile pass, using the same tool, I cut to that max roughing depth. The key thing I do though is make sure the profile pass cuts FIRST AND BEFORE THE ROUGHING. By only going to the depth of the roughing, you are not burying the tool ALL the way through the material with it cutting on both sides. If you use the profile function inside the roughing toolpath, the toolpath will take FOREVER cutting circles around wood that will eventually be knocked off by the finishing anyway. Then I do the roughing, and do it a raster strategy, NOT the 3d roughing, which is total **** and takes FOREVER. I step over about 48% with depth about .25." The reason the step over and depth of cut are important is because if you do the raster roughing strategy, you will have "terraces" and if your step over is too great, or depth of cut is too deep, you will lose the terraces or have much larger ones and your finishing tool will be plowing through material instead of just cleaning up material. It is also important to note that if you use a 2" end mill and a 1/16th" ball nose(exaggerating for clarity), this will end poorly as the larger tool simply can not fit into the small areas to clean out material for the finishing bit. I use a 3/8th" EM and a 1/4" BN, those two seem to have a nice relationship of speed/ quality.

So after the initial profile, and the roughing, I then make ANOTHER profile pass using the same tool which cuts the model completely out. I use tabs so it cuts down to z with my .5L/.1H tabs. Depending on your hold down, this may not work for you. But I always place the model in the material with .1" of material below the model. I Also offset the profile passes that I mentioned INWARD a 1/16th. This guarantees that the finishing pass will "fall off" the model and cut all the way to the edge without smacking into anything and making that terrible noise. Its also allows a very easy clean up after removing the part from the material.

So after my initial profile, the roughing, and the cut out passes all using the same roughing tool, I then switch bits to the same size end mill that corresponds with the ball nose I am going to use and run a 3rd profile pass copied from the cut out pass. On this one I use an onion skin strategy and this pass allows me to leverage the speed of the larger bit for the time consuming roughing, but also ensure the corners and tight areas are cleaned out to make the finishing toolpath safe for the smaller finishing bits.

Then its finishing time and I basically set the machine up and go do other things for the rest of the day. I run two finishing passes, the 1/4" like I mentioned with a larger step over (for speed) 30% ish, and then the final small bit with a small stepover, much like all the guys were saying 1/8th" or 1/16" BN with around 8-9% depending on how large the overall size is of the project. Finishing is always with the grain.

This is for 3d models around 2' X 2' in size, and that is what works for me.

Sorry this is long but these things work very well for me and I know how awful the sound is of the machine moving around with no cutting happening. Or lack of a sound I should say. Hope that made sense, sorry If a new guy is out of place for posting this info. Thanks to everyone for helping me to get to the point I can share information with other people, and great work Chuck!

[Chuck Keysor]

Hello Justin. Thank you for your very detailed and informative reply. I greatly appreciate the time you took to write all this down and to share it.

I was however mortified, that I had forgotten all about this thread....... Many people shared important and valuable tips. But since that project, consisting of 4 decorative appliques, http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=25096&stc=1I haven't gotten back to making any more such projects. So without thinking about these types of things, it all evaporated from my brain..... In that regard, I envy that you have been able to immerse yourself in these types of projects.

I do have a similar, but much more complex job lined up, which has fallen to the back burner, because of other things getting in the way. And this other job is something that I agreed to do a couple of years ago, to get the practice, and I said I would do it with the customer only paying for the material and the bits. Attached is the original image I had to work with, which is pretty crummy, followed by the design I have come up with. This thing is about 11 feet wide, and over 3 feet high. I was told to put a torch in the middle of it, and have acanthus branches, and make it look really Victorian. I worked on this design for untold hours spread over a month. But it just sits..... I'll have to go back and re-read this entire post before I start work on this new project. Before that though, I have to finish watching the new Aspire 8 training videos. Thanks, Chuck

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=25097&stc=1http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=25098&stc=1

[Brady Watson]

Chuck - well played. Thanks for following up.

-B