Tutorial #002: Wood Machining and Carving

Wood is generally softer than acrylic. While at the office this morning, my mug has no top cover, and I remembered while window shopping, I saw several wooden mug covers and costing above Php480 or almost $10 per piece, and I thought I should make one for my mug.

Here is a sample of what I am referring to:

And here's my mug:

The Artcam I am using is only a trial version so there are no fancy functions included and I had to be content with what the trial version has to offer, that is good  only for 2D machining, but with a little innovative idea and work around, I can still create the mug cover.

I used the same tool profile in tutorial #001,  but I will be using a 6mm straight and single flute router bit. The material I used for the project is a soft pine wood. I could smell the pinewood aroma while machining. 

All I need to draw in Artcam is 2 circles, 1 to carve the inner circle that should fit around the rim of the mug. The small inner circle should be at least 25mm deep at 100mm/sec feed rate  the z-axis. And the outer circle is the cutting edge which is at least 75mm deep. And befor edoing that, I had to smoothen the surface by about 10mm deep.

And here is the result:

Being a newbie in wood machining, this already passed my standards. For experts, this may be a dull project or at least I could made a nice artwork by carving a butterfly at the center and used other bit to smoothen the edges, but for now, this project has been a success story.