Any local CNC owner willing to help with a Project?

[VDG]

Hi all you wonderful people!

I'm currently busy building my own CNC machine but have had many snags along the way which means I sadly haven't had a chance to complete it.

I'm hoping one of the many amazing people on here would be keen to help me with an experimental project that requires engraving with a CNC machine. Of course I will provide the end mills as required.

The Project:

The concept is an aluminium plate with a diameter of 420mm maximum (actual project area maximum 380mm) plate which I would like to engrave a photo of my partner and her kids on.

Using the plate the idea is to place it on the substrate then heat it up to burn the negative image onto a piece of wood. Due to the intricacy of the image, making a template to use in a pyrography capacity makes it unachievable. Hence the conclusion of making a template to heat up therefore transferring the image to the substrate.

Conclusion:

This is of course a prototype, which I have never attempted but I'm sure others have so any and all help would of course be greatly appreciated.
This would ideally be a Christmas gift for my "manager" (wink wink lol) as it would have great sentimental value for her.

The skills I would need to gain (& understand) is converting an image into vectors and then converting them to Gcode (or whichever platform required)

Appreciation:

From the above, I can mainly just thank everyone, but in turn will post a build process (including royalties/mentions for everyone involved.
I also will want to include a "snag" list so anyone who would like to build this project can & will have some tips overall.

All in all, I believe this project will be fun for anyone attempting it!

Thank you all in advance!

Best Regards,
Andy

 

[paulrbarnard]

I can’t help personally but just wondered if you considered burning the image directly to the wood with a laser. It would probably result in a much higher quality/resolution image.

 

[donwatson]

+1 for what Paul said.

 

[TheTiddles]

And laser engraver can raster that for you
Aidan

 

[julianf]

As above, laser it. £500 or so would get you a capable machine, and a decent rotary engraving spindle would cost you over £100 before you've even strapped a motor to it.

I do CNC for work. I used to do mostly engraving (rotary) but now I mainly just mill the parts and silk screen print them.

If you are set on making the branding iron, I would suggest brass. It's still a fairly soft non ferrous, but it's melting point is that much higher than alluminium that you are less likely go melt the job by mistake.

 

[sploo]

Definite +1 for laser engraving for this job. I suspect it would also be fairly tricky to heat a ~40cm diameter metal plate both hot enough and evenly enough to get a satisfactory quality image on the wood.

 

[TheTiddles]

And laser engraver can raster that for you
Aidan

To clarify, laser straight onto your substrate, making a tool to do this isn’t a good option even for many off
Aidan