Hi there.
My name is Nils with LRN2DIY and I've recently come across a really cool
technique to be able to turn some really unique and one of a kind of pieces.
Now,
one of the things I love about a project like this is being able to blend some
high-tech solutions like CNC software and CNC, carving,
and graphics processing,
and mixing that with more traditional wood turning woodworking and other skills
that have been around for hundreds of years. In this case, for example,
I'm taking a piece of wood like this one,
it gets cut in half drilled holes in it and tubes put in it.
And then from there,
I take it to the lathe and give it that final shape that I wanted before carving
into it. From there,
I take it to the CNC and use the software to get the pattern that I want on it.
And let that 360 degree carving take place. Once that's done,
I can opt to fill those areas in with some powder or sawdust or infill,
or just leave it as is,
and then put it onto the lathe where I sand it down to its final dimensions.
And from there I can use what's called the CA glue finish to give it a super
hard and durable finish.
And then I use the pen kit and put everything together until I end up with my
final product, which is a unique one of a kind pen or pencil.
Sometime last year I learned that Snapmaker was coming out with what's called a
rotary module.
And basically this allows you to attach this rotary module onto your Snapmaker,
which does CNC, laser engraving and 3d printing. And then with that,
you could actually turn everything in 3d.
So it would rotate an object around as it carved it or as it laser engraved it.
And I thought, I've got to get my hands on one of those and try this out.
So I reached out to Snapmaker and they were good enough to send me one of their
rotary modules that I could attach to my Snapmaker A350. Now, right away,
as soon as I got started with this,
I discovered that I had a bit of a learning curve ahead of me.
I broke several bits. You can see some of them here.
There's more than this that I didn't even keep.
And so I started breaking bits by being a little too aggressive with the feed
rate and things like that.
And then I also even carved right into some of the metal parts on accident
because I wasn't doing things in the proper order.
And I even ended up with some smoking and just being overly aggressive and
causing some near fires to start by not doing things right.
So once I got past those initial hurdles,
I had one last hurdle to overcome and figure out. And that was MATH. Now,
fortunately, there was not a lot of math involved in this,
but I had pretty much completely forgotten anything I ever learned in school
about math. So I had to figure out the circumference of what I wanted to carve.
And for that you need to know the diameter or the radius.
So basically it's the diameter times PI, which is 3.14.
And once I knew that I could then plug that in,
and that becomes the width of the image that I need to use in Photoshop or
another graphics application.
Now that I was armed with the width and height of the image that I wanted to
wrap around,
I could then go out to the internet and I used a site called Vecteezy to
actually go grab a bunch of these patterns.
And it's pretty simple to find all kinds of cool stuff there.
You can also download some really awesome ones from Etsy. And then with that,
you can bring that into a photo editing software, like Photoshop,
get it to the right size, then bring it into the snap maker Luban software,
line it up. And then it's just a matter of rendering that in 3d.
So you can see exactly what that's going to turn out like. So with that,
you can get some really cool patterns like this one,
you then mount your piece into the rotary module on the CNC,
get it calibrated and let it do its thing.
So now that I have the knowledge of how to make this process work,
I went out to the shop.
I went onto the lathe and got a bunch of pens and pencils turned measured,
and then brought them in and got some designs ready for them,
put them on the CNC and had them all carved.
And then I decided it would be really cool if I could actually fill these
carvings in with some powders, some crushed stone, some sawdust,
different things like that. So here on my LRN2DIY pen,
this is actually filled in with Black Palm sawdust from one of my
pencils that you'll see in just a second. So kind of fun to be able to do that.
Now here's that pencil that I made out of Black Palm that provided the sawdust
for the earlier pen.
And I decided to fill this one in with a glow in the dark powder.
This stuff is super cool when it's dry and daylight,
it shows up as just totally white powder like you see here,
but then when you turn the lights off, it glows orange.
So I filled each of these pens in with different things like crushed stone
powder or sawdust,
and you get a cool variety of things that you can have for these pens and
pencils.
[Music]
Another really fun option is to take a more intricate pattern like this QBert
pattern here with lots of lights and darks,
carve that into the wood of a pen and then sand it down a little bit and make
that kind of a grip for your pen. This one turned out really cool.
And I haven't seen anything out there quite like that,
especially made out of a cool wooden Burl like this.
Now be sure to check the links in the description below where you can find out
more about the Snapmaker, the rotary module,
and all of the kits and designs that I used in this video.
I've been having a lot of fun working with the Snapmaker and all of the cool
things that you can do with it.
If you want to check out a little bit more about some things I like about the
Snapmaker, as well as what I don't love about it,
you can check that out in this video right here on my other channel,
the 3D Printing Zone. I'm Nils with LRN2DIY. Thanks for watching
and we'll see you next time.