First things first, find some scrap material and make it small. I chose to use plywood from the scrap bin because it’s free and available and thus, forgiving.

alt Here, I use the bandsaw to rectangular-ize my raw plywood to fit the dimensions of the Othermill CNC bed.

alt Nice hipster shot of tools and materials.

alt For my design, I borrowed a dinosaur icon from The Noun Project since they have everything and IT’S ALL SVG! With some Illustrator magic, I unify the paths and fix the fills to do what I need. I know the sharp edges of the 8-bit design won’t cut out well, but I want to see what it looks like anyway.

It’s all about the prep

  1. Click “Change” in BantamTools and it centers the spindle and walks you through the process to change the drill bit.
  2. Remove the collet, tap to clean, return to spindle.
  3. Add our 1/8 Flat End Mill Bit and hand tighten.
  4. Use the handy wrenches to properly tighten.

alt For material setup, I lined the bed with double-sided tape and placed my raw material on, doing my best to align everything to the bottom left.

alt <3 BantamTools shows you the toolpath! And a Mill-er time estimate! <3

Ready to Work

alt Not seen here, but I actually engraved the top layer gently. Here’s an image of the first cutout (contour?) pass.

alt Loving this status bar with an ability to pause. I pause a few times to vacuum.

alt The final cutout pass.

alt Cutout from above. The sharp edges in the original design turned out better than I expected.

alt Cute, quick and easy. My cutout dinosaur in about 20 minutes.

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