K-sign

Me and my old friends are all turning 50 this year, and went on a trip together with our families to the Koster islands on the west coast of Sweden. We had a lovely stay at Pensionat Ekenäs. We call ourselves the ‘Kollektiv’ so I made a little ‘K’-sign for everyone to remember the trip.

The making process

Some pictures from Koster

Julia set fractal inlay

This is my first attempt on a fractal resin inlay in wood. It is made with two different colours and also some clear resin, so there are quite many steps involved. The fractal bitmaps are made with Ultra Fractal, and converted to G-code with my own programs. The wood is walnut of size 300x300mm. This was a gift for my father on his birthday. 

Glowing tree

Here is another tree silhouette made with resin, mixed with mica powder to produce a very nice glowing effect. It is cut in a walnut piece of size 300x300mm. This was a gift for Marianne on her birthday. Here is a link to the original clipart.

Leaf in resin

This is a resin cast I made together with my daughter. The wood comes from an old pear tree we cut down in the garden last year. The bottom cast is tinted with blue mica powder, and the top cast is clear.

Wood coaster

Here is a wood coaster I made a while ago, cut from white oak. The G-code was generated using Fusion 360, and the source vector pattern can be found here.

Some steps of the making process:

Creation of the copper tree

Here are the steps involved for creating the copper tree board from the previous post.

The first thing to do is to select a nice shape. I used a black and white SVG file for the tree that looked like this:

The SVG file is run though some program that generates the G-code, which is a list of commands that tells how the CNC machine shall move in order to cut the shape in the wooden board. I have made my own G-code generators, but there are both commerical and free tools available. I can recommand the free tool called F-engrave which is very a competent program.

The CNC then gets to work and cuts the shape in the piece of wood.

It cuts the shape like a 'pocket' in the wood.

The pocket is filled with a mixture of two-component epoxy resin and pure copper powder of very fine degree.

Finally the excess resin is cut away, and the top surface is sanded and treated with oil or lacquer.

Copper tree board

This is one of the first things I did when I started working with resin - a walnut board with an inlay of epoxy resin mixed with copper powder. It was a birthday gift for my friend Jonas. The size of the board is 300x400mm.

The original file for the tree shape was downloaded from here.