Our customer has requested a carving of “The Last Supper”…the piece will be given to his wife as a gift.
We do many carvings: however, this one will have a very unique twist. The size of the piece will be 54” wide x 27” tall x 1-1/2” deep. The unique part of this project will be the use of 2 very beautiful woods. We will use Black Walnut as our canvas and inlay Sapele (a rich mahogany colored wood) for the carved area.
We began this project by importing a 3 dimensional mesh object of “The Last Supper” into our Cad software.
We created an oval flat relief 40” x 20”(the blue ring is visible under the green mesh) …we took our 3D mesh object and merged it to our relief. This conversion allows us to create tool paths for machining the piece with our CNC overhead router.
The following pictures provide an overview of the Cad files.
We glued several pieces of Sapele together for our carving blank. The blank measured 42” wide x 27” tall x 1-1/8” thick. The blank was placed on our MultiCam router and we began the machining process. We used 2 tool paths for this project…a roughing pass to remove excess material and a final pass to bring detail to the piece. The machining time to create this carving took approximately 5 hours. I am always amazed at what is hidden beneath the surface of wood!!! LOL
In our next post we will create the pocket in our Black Walnut to accept the carved Sapele inlay. Until tomorrow……………………..