Who else is a “real man”?

[Pilsbury]

So, 2 days and 17 hours.... 8.6m lines of code later.... I have something fairly presentable made from the sink cutout of my worktop. A bit of minor sanding remedy and some antique stain and I'll have a map off a pirate ship!

I've learned a few lessons.

Use the correct tool for the job. Not a 0.25mm tapered ball nose end mill for something massive when you could have atleast doubled the size and greatly reduced cut time.

Tools wear out. Especially tiny tools. Noticed a small step appearing in the cut. After a couple of hours pondering the cause, I activated feed hold to inspect the bit. Bloody tip had worn or snapped off. Just a tiny bit but noticeable.

Have more than one of each bit. Thankfully I did have 2 of the same bit. So I could just swap bits and carry on without to much bother.

Multiday cuts are a faff. Had me checking all the time, going to bed at midnight and setting my alarm for 6am to get it cutting again. This was mainly down to my time constraint of leaving for a holiday today. Still, being a novice, this did consume me.

A bucket of water gets hot. Now I initially was worried and stuck some ice packs in it. This cooled it down for about an hour which I then realised would become rather tedious doing constantly for 3 days. So I took a deep breath, got the kids IR thermometer and measured the spindle temp. Stayed pretty constant at 35-40C. Realised this was unlikely to be dangerous and relaxed.

Models can be a bit ropey when you make them big. There are some edges that have some marks/artifacts that can not be from tooling. Almost diagonal hatching type lines. I'm assuming this is in the model when scaled up. Not sure how models are made......

Bigger is better. A faff it was, but I can't wait to stain and age it up. Its going to look epic.