Ramblin' Dan's Workshop

Chin's Mojo is a band from Dallas, TX where my son Steve is the drummer. Follow this Facebook Link if you want to know more about the band. Their website is rather neglected since FB. Follow link from there to their merchandise page.

The band has a unique skull mascot as their logo (Read the story in the "About - Personal Information" section on FB) named Chin that I have wanted to use as a subject for a carving. The mascot is more of a fun super hero character than anything dark Gothic.

Steve was able to provide a jpeg of the latest version. There are many other drawings in full color (see FB) but this one was used on a T-Shirt design. I would really like to have a good vector graphic from which to work, but I didn't do too bad with what I had. Maybe the band owner can supply me better graphics if they want me to make a seriously detailed carving and perhaps a licensed product.

For my purposes here, I am only showing the creative carving process in the workshop. This is a sample for my son's use to show off and maybe use at a gig. It was fun to make.

This is the original artwork I received from Steve. Very basic B&W .jpg. Slightly reduced here even in the enlargement view but you can see it is pretty rough.	My first shot in Vectric Aspire was this rendering. It is a simple two dimension (2D) carving into a piece of wood. It would be a reasonable rendition of the original, but I was looking for more.
Here is what I wanted and was able to produce. It took me about a normal work day to fully refine this rendering and make all the detail edits. A vectored drawing would have shortened the time.	Nearly finished with the carving here on the HB2. That is 1/4 (0.250") Corian I am using. Same material I use for Lithophanes. It is an excellent medium for CNC carving.
First pass was a 0.125" ball router bit for the roughing, leaving 0.005" for the finish pass. Of course the roughing couldn't get into the fine detail. This is the finish pass with a 0.035" ball end bit. Speed 40 IPM @ 10,600 rpm.	This is the complete HB2 setup. Under the bench in the blue box is the CNC controller and there is a small WIN XP computer to the right. This is a VERY reliable system.
This is the finished piece before cleaning and re-sizing of the Corian. As can be seen the Aspire software and the HB2 can perform very detailed work.	Since this is the material I use for Lithophanes I thought that back-lighting would be interesting. And so it is...
I experimented with camera settings (mostly ISO settings) and produced this series of photos.	This is a very short video of the HB2 near the end of the several hours it took to make the carving.