Carving out wooden bowls

I wanted to improve two wooden bowls I bought for about 12 € a piece. I think, I let the pictures speak for themselves…

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those are my bowls



flattened them on both sides and inside

hehe… look at this adventurous ‘clamping’ with screw and all… later I used blue painters tape on both the waste board and my bowl and glued it together… found this idea somewhere in the forums here

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carved the outside flat with rotary module, I printed a 2" diameter extension I found on thingiverse (Snapmaker Rotary Module 2" Extension by ttaylor0024 - Thingiverse) as well as a diameter extension for the clamps (based on Snampaker Rotary Diameter Extension by drspringer - Thingiverse, but customized for my needs), since the diameter was about 180mm (outside) respectively about 130mm (inside) … little warning here: if you use those extensions - do not even think about using the origin assistant :wink: it crashes into the module, the workpiece … whatever, simply do set your origin manually (it can be a pain, I can tell…)


then the patterns

the results after many many hours, the right one will be carved out a bit more

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what is this now? I guess: those who know, know what exactly the bowls are made for…
suggestions?

the leftovers :rofl:
btw. actually it is filled to the brim and I even had to throw some dust away… (anecdote: my brother suggested to glue/model a third and fourth bowl together with the remaining dust ^^)

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now, I am very very satisfied in the end - although I had very frustrating moments…

some specs for you:
wood: Paulownia - very very soft wood (also called ‘Kiri’, one of the fastest growing trees)
bits I used: 3.175 flat end mill (SM), 3.175 ball end mill (SM), Groove V-bit (SM), 6mm flat end mill, 6mm ball end mill
workspeeds: I could always use 500 to 700 mm/s and step down between 0.5 and 1mm
step over: mostly the preset from Luban, for the patterns with the groove bit I used 0.1mm
software: Luban for the first tries flattening (such a pain in the ass regarding to the working times), then I started learning to use (and understand) Fusion 360 (I recommend this for almost everything by now), for the rotary module works I used Luban again, since Fusion seems not to support this (or I simply did not look well enough for some ‘manuals’)

I will keep some of the dust to make wood putty if necessary (and yes, I have to ‘repair’ some holes here and there due to wrong settings which have been my fault)… simply mix it with wood glue - if hardened you can even mill or grind it without problems…

Thanks for reading :wink:

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and just with the last “fine tuning” it happened… One moment of inattention (I set the end height accidentally as the start height), it took seconds before I could stop the machine but the damage was done…

now my wood putty was needed… problem I had: I want to stain the wood and hand-made wood putty will reject any wood stain (or oil), at least that’s what I read…
I just experimented a bit… I mixed my wood dust with stain to the colour I had in mind and afterwards mixed it with the glue…
the result (there have been the failures in the pic above as well as a little knot-hole I tried to fix):

need to let it dry now and then do some grinding…

Very nice work! The Snapmaker can be quite the capable little CNC carver in the right context.

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indeed… I have to admit, I treated the CNC as an orphan the whole time… because I did not need it, did not want to learn all the CNC stuff and so on… for my needs it was capable enough which is good to know. For little projects like this entirely sufficient

It has taken some time and spent material/broken bits but I can do some interesting reliefs using 3 levels of grey plus black for the bottom and white for the highest points. One shade per mm in target depth.

I also found with carve mode if you put 0.5 mm for material left to carve Luban will actually present a decent preview in 3D before you export to workspace.

Two things that I would like is spindle rotation speed setting in options as well as the ability to draw two shapes and carve the material between them. Also, iluban supports arcs in gcode, I manually typed up a 5 line gcode file that carved a circle. It also would lower the z axis as it carved the arc. if you draw a circle in Luban with the shape tool it writes it in linear mode and does a z bounce for each level drop, many lines of code for a circle that can be done with one line and smoother with arc vs linear. Maybe there is a good reason for this that I am overlooking.