First thing I felt ready to hang on the wall in the house....

I wanted to make something for a spot in the kitchen, so I chose the first intials of each of us in the family (probably will re-do later with other letters, but it's a good start). It's hard to see the detail in the picture, but I wanted to connect the letter witout being able to see the connector joint. The soulution was that each letter piece is two pieces - one 1/8" ply of Baltic Birch Plywood, and a 1/16" pience of basswood vaneer on top. The ply has the T-shaped notches for the connectors (see in blue of the incscape design), the vaneer doesn't. The result is really great.

 

However, some lessons were learned. Next time, I think I will finish the wood FIRST before cutting. The staining, sanding and finishing was really tough after it was cut. Also, a lesson learned before this was to not use Birch Plywood, but to use Baltic Birch Plywood. As seen in the image below, regular Birch can burn horribly when you try to cut it. This is because of layers of dark glule between the wood. The Baltic Birch Plywood uses a white glue, there are no dark layers when viewing from the side. The 1/8" cuts great at 30% speed and 100% power. I cut the vaneer at 80% and 100% power.

  

Reactor!

A while back I downloaded software from Jason Dorie's CNC website called Reactor (http://jasondorie.com/page_cnc.html), which creates a "reaction/diffusion" pattern seeded from an image. It's a really neat effect, but needs to be done with just the right image. So far, the only face shots I've successfully seen work are with sunglasses on. Here's on of my wife and I on the beach in Northern California. It's on black acrylic. I'd like to do it again on wood.