Luckily we had no major issues and we clamped it up from all sides and let it dry. In order for it all to go together, all 6 pieces had to come together at the same time. Using non-toxic wood glue, we rolled it across all 24 surfaces, inserted biscuits with a bit of glue on them into each slot, and then slowly put the cube together all at once. One trick we like to use is to roll blue tape around the roller, which can be removed later and allows us to use the same roller many times without the glue ruining it on first use. Since there's a lot of surface area to glue up in a short time, we used a glue roller to apply the glue along the miters. From there we marked each side so they didn't get mixed up and then flipped them over so the bottom was facing up. We carefully aligned the 6 pieces for each cube and made sure they were rotated correctly and all in the right place. Make sure you're using the right size biscuit for the slots you've cut!!Īssembling the blocks was something we worried would be really difficult and prone to a lot of errors, but in the end with the correct preparation and planning it went smoothly. :( Nothing will go together and you'll have some big problems trying to assemble your pieces. We learned the hard way that if the biscuit is too big.well, bad things happen.
The size of the biscuit slot you cut corresponds to the size of the biscuit you're going to use. This helped us cut 144 biscuit slots in about 10 minutes. We cut all 4 slots on one side, then moved both the tool and the workpiece to the opposite side of the T-stop and repeated the process. There's more detail here in the video, but essentially we set the tool to its 45-degree setting and then we aligned the biscuit joiner on a T-stop clamped to the bench and aligned the workpiece to the same edge. These are small slots cut into the joint (using a Biscuit Joiner) where you insert 'biscuits' (see image/video) that hold the pieces together.Įach miter had 2 biscuit slots, meaning we had to cut 144 identical slots.so we set up a neat jig for this on our bench. To hold the cube together as well as to help align the pieces during assembly, we opted for biscuit joints. We cut them all at a single depth of 1/8" and each carve took about 60 seconds each. This "cancels out" the carving in that area, so the letters are actually left alone while the space around them gets cut away.
#Alphabet block letters series
The middle layer was a series of stripes on top of the bottom layer that lay across the middle set to 1/8" depth, and then on top, we put the letter itself but set the cut depth to zero. The lowest layer was a large square set to 3/8" deep. We also carved the corresponding letters for each animal by using three layers of cut depths in Easel. We chose A, B, and C because they're classic for this project and we chose J, O, and Y because with that combination of 6 letters we could spell the baby's initials and a good number of other words.Īlso, our friend thinks Bigfoot and Yetis are real.so it seemed like the perfect choice. Since we wanted to paint the inside of the carved lines but leave the face of the wood unpainted, we used blue painter's tape to mask off the entire thing and then let the machine cut away the areas that would be painted.Įach animal took about 30 minutes to carve. It's also nice because it comes to a perfectly fine tip and is ideal for carves with a lot of small detail. We used a 'V-Groove' bit for the carving, which, instead of a flat line gives you a really interesting V-style edge. The animals were carved to a depth of 1/8".
#Alphabet block letters software
For the animals, we found a really nice pack of animal vector art that we purchased and then in Adobe Illustrator we edited and simplified the artwork to customize it to exactly what we wanted.įrom there, the vector art gets imported into the Easel software for the X-Carve and we can move it around and size it appropriately for our 9" square pieces. This part was a lot of fun! We used the X-Carve CNC to create some really awesome shapes on all the sides of our alphabet blocks.Įach cube was going to have 2 letters, 2 animals, 1 number and 1 skull.
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