The First Test Cut

(more an experiment)

The magical day with with the documentary and printing The project started on Sunday, April 12th.

By Friday April 19th I’d made it to the Artifactory for a go.

Having ascertained that there were appropriate SVGs readily available from wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fuller_projection_rotated.svg) I simply imported one to VCarve discovered the “Trim” tool (which I still whole-heartedly love), whipped up some tool paths.

With the help of talented and beautiful Jenna (I still didn’t have the authority to use Swarf-o-mat by myself), found some scrap MDF and cut out Antartica -- the very first test.

As expected it was an un unusable failure, but I learned a *lot* and I was still thrilled.

The big lesson being that the milling bit has a diameter of 3mm.

Can you see how these fit together, er, not at all?

This defines the amount of detail that’s allowed. I know that this should have been obvious, but some things have to be learned empirically.

A solution came pretty quickly, as you can hopefully see from the pencil sketch on those pieces. The answer is to make a simplified "cut" outline as is appropriate for each piece, with the borders engraved on the piece (if possible!). 

Reckon it'd look amazing! Noooot quite sure how this is done though :)