It’s hard not to jump head first into cutting all sorts of crazy things on your CNC machine.  Trust me – I fight the urge almost everyday.  In this post/video, I wanted to tackle a simple project that highlighted how easy it was to use the Shapeoko and the Carbide 3d software.  This project is ideal if you’re just starting out for a number of reasons.  First, you’re not cutting all the way through the stock so you don’t need to worry about tabs or finding a way to keep the stock secure once cut.  Second, I used scrap wood that I had sitting around so if I messed it up it wouldn’t have been the end of the world (and it turned out sort of cool!).

So in this video I show how easy it is to use a piece of free software called Inkscape to trace a image and turn it into an SVG file which you can then import directly into Carbide Create.  So without further babbling here’s the video walk through of how I made this sign…