carving action figures

[JMecham01]

Hi All,

I'm brand new to the world of CNC machines and I would like to try using a desktop machine to make 3"-5" stone versions of various action figures.

I know I'd be using alabaster, soapstone and/or marble, but I'm rather in-the-dark in terms of what specs I should look for and how I would go about finding images and inputting them into the machine.

Any and all input would be greatly appreciated!

Also, if anyone has ideas on how I could try my hand at this without dropping a lot of money on a machine at the onset, that would be great as well!

Thanks in advance,

John

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[NIC 77]

Try a 3d printer with a finish that has a stone look. If you want to carve actual stone, be ready to drop some coin.

[RCaffin]

Can be done, but you need a fairly stiff machine.

The rock is basalt. The machining uses diamond cutters and is slow ... and it needs to be done under water.

Cheers
Roger

[ger21]

Do they even make diamond tooling for stone in small enough sizes?

[JMecham01]

Thanks, Roger! So you mean the frame of the machine should be stiff? What machine specs should I look for?

John

Can be done, but you need a fairly stiff machine.

The rock is basalt. The machining uses diamond cutters and is slow ... and it needs to be done under water.

Cheers


Roger

[JMecham01]

Try a 3d printer with a finish that has a stone look. If you want to carve actual stone, be ready to drop some coin.

Yep, looking to carve actual stone.

[awerby]

Soapstone can be carved with high-speed steel; alabaster can be carved with tungsten carbide. Marble works best with diamond tooling. One problem is holding onto the material as it's being carved; gluing a block of wood onto the base can help with that.

Another problem with figurines is reaching all the surfaces with the tools. Finer tools tend to be shorter, so it becomes difficult to reach areas under the arms or between the legs with the finishing tools. Sometimes people get around that by dividing the figure up into small pieces - legs and arms carve easier as separate parts. Articulated action figures are usually done this way- the pieces are generally molded separately and the castings are assembled.

I'm not sure you'll find exactly what you want for free on the internet, but you can look in places like Thingiverse, Turbosquid, and Sketchfab. You need STL files with a high polygon count to avoid a faceted appearance. Of course, it would be best to invest in some modeling software so you can make your own models.

Ideally, for this sort of work, you would use a robot arm, or a six-axis Cartesian machine. These are expensive and complicated to use, though, and the software is costly as well. I don't think the cheapest Chinese routers would work too well for this, but a small 4-axis mill, like the Taig machines I sell, would be a cost-effective way to test the waters. The Hobbyist edition of DeskProto would work to write the G-code, once you had the STL files.

Andrew Werby
computersculpture.com

[RCaffin]

I have diamond cutters down to 1 mm (and up to 50 mm). The smaller ones are a bit fragile - what do you expect? I am not sure about <1 mm. I think you can get 'points' smaller than 1 mm.

You need a 'stiff' machine, but how stiff ... I don't know. If you are using a 1 mm cutter you are not going to be exerting huge forces on the frame. The machining needs to be done under water - I started with a full water bath and the cutter submerged, but that was hard to set up so I switched to flooding. The trouble with water is that it rusts steel, and bearings.

I spin up to 3,000 RPM. I am not sure whether going faster would be a win or a lose. The water spins off everywhere sometimes. However, if you are doing 2,000 rpm with a 6 mm cutter, you would need 6,000 rpm with a 2 mm cutter to get the same surface speed.

The rocks you mentioned are all fairly soft, so should be easy enough.

Cheers
Roger

[JMecham01]

Thanks again! Are there any desktop machines you could recommend where I would only be using steel bits (for soapstone) or tungsten-carbide bits for alabaster?

[JMecham01]

Great info!! I'm looking to create stone versions of figures that already exist but nothing requiring a lot detail (think My Little Pony, not Transformers). In any case, I'm guessing I'd have to find 3D images of them somewhere or have a 3D scan done.

What is G-code?

John

[RCaffin]

I am going to dodge making any recommendations for desktop machines, mainly becasue i have not heard of any which i would want to buy. Pay cheap, get cheap.

Ah - with all due respect, if you don't know what g-code is at this stage, then you are going to have a long learning curve ahead of you. But then, a lot of us didn't know what it is when we started, so ...

A fairly common suggestion at this stage would be to buy a small cheap machine, possibly second hand, and to start machining softwood. To be treated as training wheels and discarded when you have outgrown them. Trust me, this is NOT a cheap hobby!

Cheers
Roger

[JMecham01]

Yep, there's veeery little I know at this point.

That makes sense about getting a starter machine. Can you tell me more about G-code?

John

[RCaffin]

G-code ... Best to buy a book on g-code from the web. OR, download the Mach3Mill_1.84.pdf file from Artsoft and study it. It is actually quite a good primer, although it DOES require study. It is not really a teaching manual.

Cheers
Roger

[awerby]

Thanks again! Are there any desktop machines you could recommend where I would only be using steel bits (for soapstone) or tungsten-carbide bits for alabaster?

Yes; Taig Tools makes robust and reasonably-priced miniature benchtop mills in Arizona; a 4th axis with tailstock is a standard option.

Andrew Werby
computersculpture.com

[JMecham01]

Great... Thanks, Andrew!

Yes; Taig Tools makes robust and reasonably-priced miniature benchtop mills in Arizona; a 4th axis with tailstock is a standard option.

Andrew Werby
computersculpture.com

[JMecham01]

Understood. So I'm going to throw naivete on the table along with my ignorance: I suppose I had this idea in my head if I found the right type of machine - and something not too enormous or expensive (under a couple grand) - and the 3D images, I would just plug the thing into my computer, tell the machine which image to carve and then voila... But the more I learn about the subject, on here and through other sources, that's just wishful thinking. From the little I just read about use of G-code, it seems I would also have to program the machine as to what path of movement/progress the bit should take. Am I right on both counts?

If so, it seems like I might be better of taking the raw stone and images to a CNC shop/fabricator.

John

[JMecham01]

Well think of all the small stone carvings you see at major tourist gift shop... And I mean where you see a dozen of the same exact carving in one place. It makes me think there's got to be a way to mass produce them. Even if it's done by one big machine, working on multiple carvings at once.

[awerby]

Understood. So I'm going to throw naivete on the table along with my ignorance: I suppose I had this idea in my head if I found the right type of machine - and something not too enormous or expensive (under a couple grand) - and the 3D images, I would just plug the thing into my computer, tell the machine which image to carve and then voila... But the more I learn about the subject, on here and through other sources, that's just wishful thinking. From the little I just read about use of G-code, it seems I would also have to program the machine as to what path of movement/progress the bit should take. Am I right on both counts?

[It's not really that difficult to write a G-code program the machine can follow. In the old days, one had to write G-code by hand, but these days you can use a CAM program (like Deskproto, for example) to do it for you. You still need to tell it stuff like which tool you want to use, how close together you want the passes of the tool to be, how fast you want to go (there are speed-feed charts for that) but the process is fairly simple; it's not really "programming" in the sense of writing code yourself.]

If so, it seems like I might be better of taking the raw stone and images to a CNC shop/fabricator.

John

Good luck with that. Most CNC shops are focused on a particular process, like high-speed milling of steel, aluminum mold production, or cutting pieces out of plywood, and want orders of significant volume in order to make it worth their while. I don't know of any that specialize in soft stone miniatures; my guess is that if you found one the cost would be prohibitive. But I'm not really clear on the object of this exercise - is this a commercial project, where you need hundreds of these little stone figurines and have a way to sell them for a good profit? Or is it more like a hobby you're thinking of getting into?

[awerby]

Well think of all the small stone carvings you see at major tourist gift shop... And I mean where you see a dozen of the same exact carving in one place. It makes me think there's got to be a way to mass produce them. Even if it's done by one big machine, working on multiple carvings at once.

Those things are mostly made by hand, by workers paid very little. Here's an example: Carved Soapstone Animals - Bulk Sales It's probably possible to set up large machines to make them, but it's hard to see how you could compete on price. As I mentioned before, the biggest problem in producing them is figuring out a way to hold onto them while the process is happening. Anything you're carving on a CNC machine has to be held very firmly. Just paying someone to put them in a fixture, reposition them as needed, then unload them to put in the new blanks is going to eat up the 50 cents or so they eventually sell for at wholesale - unless you're in China or someplace like that, in which case it would probably make more sense to have people carve them by hand.

[RCaffin]

naivete on the table along with my ignorance: I suppose I had this idea in my head if I found the right type of machine - and something not too enormous or expensive (under a couple grand) - and the 3D images, I would just plug the thing into my computer, tell the machine which image to carve and then voila... But the more I learn about the subject, on here and through other sources, that's just wishful thinking.
Yes, that IS just wishful thinking - by a very large mile. A very, very large mile - more like an Astronomical Unit imho.

Those 'carved in Peru' things are CRUDE, but at $1.50 each retail, what were you expecting? Slave labour anyhow.

Cheers
Roger