Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “12 Foot Wide CNC’d Window Art”.
My father had this screened-in back porch added to his house and something about that giant empty space up there bothered me so i wanted to make something cool. I started by measuring out each one of those three window areas and i drew a template in autodesk’s fusion. 360. here i’m just drawing up the actual shapes, and you can see that i’m just making sure all the measurements are exactly the same.
I didn’t do all three, because those two sides are mirrored now he had explained he wanted a peace sign in the middle and frogs on the sides, and so i started with just that. I just pulled it into photoshop and it started just drawing and sketching out what i thought would be a good design and, of course, keeping in mind that this is for the cnc router. So you can’t have islands, it’s kind of like designing a stencil. Just finding pictures on the internet and drawing out random shapes here just going for a visual representation here, nothing super precise, and i i made a preview of this here and there you can see the final preview window that i sent him. He loved the design and told me to go ahead and make it happen.
So i brought it into fusion uh by creating a vector file in illustrator, first just tracing what i had, then i bring it into fusion and simply extrude it and then it’s time for some cam. My first run i goofed up. Somehow. I have no idea what i did uh, but the end mill snapped, and so i had to start over after that i had no problems at all.
I think i slowed down a tiny bit, but really i didn’t change much else, so it could have just been a fluke but uh. This went fairly painlessly. The only problem i had was that these big three quarter inch boards were warped a bit and so the depths weren’t consistent across them and also the pressure treated lumber just seems kind of damp to the touch.
I don’t know if that’s normal or what you can see here. This is one of the side pieces getting done and then that gets cut out and i go through and i pop out all the pieces with a handsaw so that you can see the final design. It’S a mixture of 2d pocket and 2d contours, the small sections.
I do a pocket which grinds up all the wood and vacuums it out and on the larger sections i do a contour which leaves it in place and just cuts out the shape. It’S really fun. To watch this in fast motion, even though the whole process wasn’t very long at all, i think each one of these panels was only about 15 minutes. Now, here’s the main panel, i missed a section of filming. I had not secured the center of the board down very well, so it was bowed up and actually rubbed on the the collet of the cnc router, and you can see the dark marks around some of those cuts from that. But overall there was no damage done and it cut perfectly fine.
This is a very large project uh, so you know the costs add up. The wood itself was probably 70 just in the two big sheets of wood, so i didn’t really want to start over. If there was any small mistakes that i could overlook later, i sanded the entire thing with a hand, sander and then came back with a dremel with a little sanding attachment on the tip of it to clear off some of these edges, you can see those edges Were really rough in some areas, and i don’t know if it was the wood or the end mill or my settings or what? But the dremel cleared it right up. It took several coats of paint.
I did some myself painting this, and then i ended up having my kids do a bunch of it afterwards, painting down inside those crevices was not fun. I would highly recommend using a sprayer if you’re gon na do something like this, instead of a paintbrush down in those little bitty gaps after that it was time to slide it up in there and see if it fits. As you can see here, the main piece doesn’t quite fit and i ended up having to trim it a little bit. I tried it both directions, just to make sure it just doesn’t quite fit in that lip. You can’t quite tell, but i’ve got it sitting on a on a ledge there in front of the edge, but you get a pretty good estimate of what it’s going to look like here after i go and trim things up after some quick trimming. There’S the final product here it is, and i absolutely love the way it turned out, not too extreme. It doesn’t draw your attention to it.
It’S a little bit subtle, being painted the same colors as the rest of the porch here, but when you want to look at it, it’s pretty neat looking the best part is my father loves it. Now. If i were to do this again, there are a few things i would do differently. I don’t know if it was the wood that i chose or what, but the cuts, some of them weren’t very clean pressure-treated wood feels damp to the touch sometimes and – and there were areas where you know the fibers wouldn’t break up right and even sanding. It was a hassle, i don’t know if i needed to change wood or change the settings on the cnc router.
The second part is painting it. Oh, my goodness do not hand paint one of these get a sprayer at least i’m going to get a sprayer. If i do another one of these hand, painting inside all those crevices was a hassle, but overall, i’m very happy with how it turned out. Keep your eyes on this channel be sure to like and subscribe. You .