For the next accent piece design we are taking the grape motif from the the gate and applying it in a smaller scale. We had the opportunity to purchase a small (2′ x 2′) CNC machine nearly ten years ago which has made this project much more approachable. By taking a 3D file and computing it, we are able to generate a toolpath file that tells our machine what to carve. My son (with the majority of the computing skills) imports, scales, tweaks and renders the CNC files for routing.

The first few passes are very rough. We use a ¾” ball nose bit to gouge out most of the pine, which is soft enough to handle that much removal. The toolpath calculates the shape of the router bit and the depth of the file to cut out just the negative space. When completed, the rough pass barely resembles what our final shape will look like.

The final pass is made with a ⅛” bit and takes much longer. This particular file ran in just about four hours. There is a vacuum hose attached to catch some of the debris. After the the file is run the board need to be ripped down and cleaned. The CNC leaves a little bit of work to do, mainly the small lines from each pass need to be sanded down.