My long term goal is to make some custom furniture with intricate detail work; this one is mostly to figure some stuff out. The deep cut and straight diagonal cut were user error, but everything else came out pretty nicely. The plywood chipping was expected, but everything else came out well.
The next step is to cut it out, but I have to do some troubleshooting first (had a loose belt). I’ll post another picture when I’m done. I’m also expecting a bit of breakage of the thin pieces, but need to know how well the Maslow handles it, and how fine 2.5d details can be before running into issues.
It was a shallow cut with a 1/4 inch 60 deg v bit. It worked out pretty well; I was hoping I could use etching to give some texture to future projects.
I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, even with the issues.
I had to change the calibration values, so the rough cut didn’t follow the etching. And a lot of the fine details broke off during the cutting.
I’m case or helps anyone else out, the parts that broke were all unsupported, and broke off on the third pass. Nothing that was 1/8 in or larger broke. Some 1/16 in details chipped off, and some survived.
I used a 1/8 in 2 flute downcut bit at the lowest speed setting in the DeWalt dp611 router on 1/8 in 3 ply. Unsupported details smaller than 2mm often break off.
And this works fine for everything I have planned, but if anyone thinks different settings could decrease breakage, it might help someone else out.
Did you have any issues with the downcut bit? Is your setup vertical or horizontal? I know there are some concerns with the downcut bits pushing the Maslow away from the work surface. Did you see any of that?
I’ve got a vertical setup, with a 30 degree angle, and didn’t see any issues with the maslow being pushed away from the frame. I mainly used downcut to have a cleaner top surface on the plywood.
