I wanted something easy for the first project, and found a nice trivet design on Thingiverse. It’s the “flowerhead” design from that page. I made it about the right size to hold a coffee mug. “Easy” here means it’s just 2-dimensional.
This was cut with a 1/8″ single flute straight router bit, using 1/4″ baltic birch plywood. I’d like to try another one, bigger next time.
I did a small amount of light sanding, then finished it with some poly-based varnish laying around. I made a little dish out of aluminum foil to hold the varnish, and dunked the entire trivet right in, then hung it to drip and dry. It came out with a nice thick coat (and a few bubbles!).
Lessons learned
- The original design had many small holes near the center, which were smaller than the cutter diameter. The VCarve software didn’t like that, and threw errors. I had to edit the design to get rid of all these holes in order to create the toolpath. Maybe there’s some setting to fix this?
- I was using the wrong post processor, which resulted in longer cutting time (>30 minutes) than necessary.
howardpinder.com 