[The Hobbyist]

I have become involved in setting up a haunted house for a local church group. Since I have the 5x10 CNC router table (A Samson 510 plasma table with a DeWalt 611 router in place of the plasma torch) I have taken on the task of making the rocking tombstones, and a few other things. The mechanical end is fairly easy. I will use the driveway alerts from Harbor Freight Tools to trigger the motion. They are GOOD to have around for projects like this, because they can be used to trigger things in a couple of different ways. They will also come in handy during the zombie apocalypse!

The router bits arrived today from Amazon. Dang it! Too short! I am going to try anyway. Since I am only carving closed cell foam (the blue stuff from Lowe's) I THINK I can get away with grabbing less of the shank in the collet. The foam will not resist cutting, and I can slow down the router to keep things civil. What I really need is a 1/4" ball tip with a 3" shank. I can't find one.

This is the first tombstone I will carve. I was going to do the "Crying Angel" but Halloween is a strange event. It is completely against church teachings to celebrate 'The Day of the Dead' and yet ... it seems to be the biggest thing with church people. So the props can be scary, but they cannot make references to God, or Jesus, or angels Demons and monsters are fair game.

I have 2" thick foam sheets. I will post some photos of the results...

Joe

 

[The Hobbyist]

I picked a different design and used the wrong bit, but it was just a TEST cut.

Joe

 

[RainMan 2.0]

That’s looks pretty neat . Great idea using foam for a test .

for halloween I was debating to take my work truck home , it’s a bucket truck with 40’ of lift . Was going to put a lit up ghost in the bucket . Thought it might be kind of cool , well unless it comes loose and blows into the 50kv power lines

 

[DesertRatTom]

Even without the smoothing, that reallt works. Can you use a water based paint on it? Spray lacquer would damage it. Really cool. I bet you could sell a ton of those, well, maybe not a ton... Got a local gift store, or for any store that will do a window display. We have a cake and cupcake store here that would love this, same with in independent coffee shop that sells pumpkin flavored coffee and treats. I bet you could sell at least 30 locally. Almost tempted to buy a CNC to do this myself. LOL

I am not a fan of pumpkin flavor, not since I saw how it's made...

 

[The Hobbyist]

It occurs to me that I could use a long thin STRAIGHT RASP bit to hog out the meat of the design, and then come back for a final pass with the 1/4" ball end bit with a much narrower stepover. Since the meat is all gone already, any material the shank of the ball bit would have hit has already been removed. I will try that as my next experiment. nine weeks to go!

Joe