Mike Lyon

Painting Drawing Printmaking Japanese Woodblock Printing Furniture Lighting

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Computer Carving Machine operational!

January 18, 2006 By Mike Lyon

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The Large Press installation is almost done now! This week I’m cutting the final parts — the vacuum plenum for the press itself… This is a somewhat complicated task it turns out, but I believe I’ve got it figured out.

I’ve successfully moved my ShopBot CNC machine from the 3rd to the 1st floor… After cutting a large vacuum plenum to hold 4×8 foot by quarter-inch plywood sheets flat and solidly in place on the machine, I experimented yesterday by carving the dozen blocks for my prints for Baren Forum Mythical Beasts Exchange (#27).

My kids gave me a nifty and TINY little all-digital video camera for XMAS, and I used it to shoot a 2 1/2 minute video of the computer-guided tool in action:

You may want to turn down your volume as the router is very loud and obnoxious… What you’ll see are some brief cuts of V-bit carving to outline the printing shapes, then clearing outside the V-carved areas with a 1/4″ down-spiral — I’ve also shown a couple of views of the control screen — the first shows each line of program code as it’s executed — I think we’re at about line 14,000 in the shot — later there’s a view showing the cutting head position in X (length) Y (width) and Z (height) coordinates.

The blocks turned out quite nicely! I’ll be printing in pinks and greens for this one…

2006_01_22_hannya_200dpi.jpg 'Hannya' January 22, 2006, chuban (about 10x8) woodcut from twelve blocks for barenforum.org exchange 27 (mythical beasts)

Filed Under: Equipment, Woodblock Tagged With: CNC Machine, Computer Carving Machine, Digital Video Camera, Greens, Pinks, Plenum, Plywood Sheets, Prints, Quarter Inch Plywood, Router, Spiral, Vacuum

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