Milling Gifts with the Shapeoko
I made Mother’s Day gifts using my Shapeoko 2 CNC router. The first gift was a simple relief carving of a nautilus into stained Baltic birch. The second gift was a profile of my daughter cut from stained Baltic birch as well. I’ll detail that in a separate post.
Prep
I used the same stain from a previous project, Rustoleum Ultimate Wood Stain kona. Applied with a hobby sponge and wiped off with a paper towel. The wood is plywood from the hobby / crafts section at the orange box store. It’s the same 1/4″ birch from my enclosure project. 
Workflow
The workflow is Inkscape, makercam.com, preview in Universal GCode Sender. Repeat until things look correct. I then do an air print to make sure my work area is good. Finally I cut the real material.
I used Inkscape to extract an outline and manipulate the paths. Import the image in to Inkscape. Use the Path tools for creating a BMP. I experiment with the options until I find something close to what I want. The rest of the clean up and vector work uses the path edit tool. Save the vector as a SVG file and load it in to makercam.com.
Be sure to set your pixels per inch to 90 in the image preferences when using makercam with Inkscape
I used the follow path tooling for the simple relief carving. A depth of 0.0.3125″ and a ball endmill was enough to clear a layer of the plywood. Be sure to check the visualization to see if everything makes sense. I spent time editing the paths and redoing the CAM in order to get the lines cut like I wanted.
Results
I recorded the milling process with my iPhone to create a time-lapse video using the Frameograph app. I did several coats of satin finish poly to seal and protect the wood. My finishing skills are terrible and that was my first time using poly. Skill takes practice. Here is the video of the milling job followed by some finished photos.
