Projects:Brass Engraving on the CNC Router

Project by: AlexN

Overview

I've done a bit of work with soft metals on our Fireball V90 CNC router, and I wanted to shared my latest experience with doing texturing on an old brass handle. I was given a piece of brass from Ned over at Chase's Garage to see if I could do something with it. Not having any clear ideas on how to turn it into anything other than a door handle, I decided to just make it look cooler.

The Programming

I opened up everyone's favorite VCarve Pro and started drawing the outline of the handle. It was a pretty simple rounded rectangle, so I just drew a box the size of the piece, drew to circles, and joined things together to make the shape. This would serve as my reference for laying things out.

I then started playing around with the Create Vector Texture to make wavy lines. I thought some diagonal pattern would look the most interesting, so I put it at around a 45 degree angle. The line spacing I thought would look best if it was close together. I was planning on using a ball endmill to do the carving and wanted the grooves it cut to meet up and make sharp peaks. I used the Profile toolpath, set it to follow on the line, and gave it a depth of cut of about 0.06.

For my tool settings I chose a 0.125 inch ball endmill, and from experience I knew to change my Feedrate to about 30 ipm and the Plunge rate to 6 ipm. The worst experiences I've had with metals on the CNC were because of the awful sound of the endmill plunging straight down and not being able to handle the cut, so taking it reeeaaal slow helps a lot with that.

After a few back and forths of previewing and tweaking it, I had it looking the way I wanted. I then decided to carve the other side as well, ideally using the same pattern. I did some rough measuring to find out where the holes were (previously used to mount the handle). Then I cut out an oval shape on that end so I could cut around the holes and keep the pattern intact.

(to be continued)