Dragon project (Oak coffee table)

[luke11cnc]

Hello all
over the next four or five weeks I'm going to make a coffee table. This coffee table is for a friend of the wife's and she has no idea it's coming.
So I started to buy bits (on a budget)

I first bought the model I think she will like, this particular friend Love dragon's in any form so I'm hoping she will like a coffee table if not I could always sell it on Ebay LOL

So as not to waste money I did a trial cut in MDF now this material may be cheap as chips but it's not very good for carving as it will fluff up
I would be interested in a better material for proofing a carving.

So I downloaded my chosen model to cut3d which to my surprise is very basic, in fact I found it to basic so artcam is the program I'm going to try next time

Any way I set up my CNC Machine to carve at 414x300 and at a depth if 15mm
As I only had a 6mm ball nose I wasn't going to run a smoothing pass but at the last minuet I did , but I'm glad I did as I found that the ball nose cutter cut's the out edge of the model which would snap a fine 1.5mm ball nose cutter so I will run a out line cut out before the final finishing pass

so for this time I ran the following cutters 6mm end mill (next time I will use a 6mm ball nose) for the rouging pass and a 6mm ball nose for the finishing pass (next time I will use a 1.5mm or a 2mm ball nose)

so here is the video of the model being cut
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GBCA...W_rqlPCBNzu93a



I plan to start Laminating the Oak for the table top If the Wood glue comes Saturday which I ordered today from ebay
The Oak came on Wednesday But I need to put it through my planer and then laminate.
I also plan to carve this model onto the legs and all joints to be cut on my CNC Machine

As always advice greatly received

James