Othermill

I had a great deal of trouble with this week’s assignment, to the point that the thing isn’t finished. If I can manage the energy, I might finish it later, but for now I think I’ve tried hard enough.

This is what I wanted to mill. It’s an abstract representation of the north shore mountains– the mountains that tower over Vancouver. A little piece of home! I had trouble with picking something to mill, as I only had a 1/8” bit, and a lot of my original ideas needed finer milling. This was good enough, though.

I took great care to load the bit and stick my block onto the machine the first time around. Later attempts, which I had to do, I took less care, and the block came off the base a few times. I think this is because I didn’t give it time to cure, but later, when I left the block on the board a little longer, I had no troubles with it coming off.

Unfortunately, I had trouble with this machine when I started to run the job. Whenever I tried, it seemed to stop and restart itself. I hypothesized it was a power issue, so I switched the power supply with that of another machine, but when I did this, the machine would constantly beep and did not spin the bit. I ended up giving up and trying a different machine.

When I switched to an Othermill Pro, it worked very well, but was a long job (nearly an hour!) and loud as hell. I had by this point already attempted three attempts on the other machine, and then with the Pro, it took me two tries before the glue set properly. Since I had spent so much time already listening to the machine mill extremely loudly, and since I was the only one milling, I rearranged the sound dampeners to suit my needs. I made a fort, in other words.

About 40 minutes into this job and after a few vacuums, even the Othermill Pro decided it could have no more and restarted in the middle of a cut. I suspect it overheated from the lengthy job. At this point, I had been at this for hours, and it was nearly midnight, so I decided to leave the job as it was and clean up.

This is the final result, but I might take it back and finally cut the thing out. The engravings are rather fine– I just need to cut the damn thing out.

The reason the right triangle is cut off was because I kept using the same piece of wood and didn’t align it perfectly with each attempt– I could’ve restarted, but I had grown attached to the dumb thing.