Carving a 3D Eagle in Wood with Refreshed Furnishings
Refreshed Furnishings restores old furniture in Morehead City, North Carolina, and 3D carves butcher block on a ShopSabre 23 CNC router.
If you run a furniture restoration or refinishing shop and want to know which CNC router handles deep 3D relief carving in solid hardwood, this episode is a direct answer. It is also the answer to a question a lot of small shop owners ask first: can you use a CNC for 3D work if nobody on your team is a digital artist.
Refreshed Furnishings has been open about two years. Sherri owns the shop. The business restores and refinishes old furniture, engraves tabletops, does epoxy inlay, builds new cabinetry, and produces 3D carved wall art.
Morehead City sits in an older part of coastal North Carolina where a lot of furniture still in service was built in the 1800s. Replacement legs, pickets, and turned components for those pieces are not available to buy. On the design side, the shop does not do much digital design work in house and buys 3D art files from online digital artists instead.
The shop runs a ShopSabre 23 with a fourth axis. The fourth axis lets them probe an original leg or picket, build a 3D model from it, and recreate the part. For artwork they cut butcher block at an inch and a half thick because it arrives flat. In this episode Roy sizes a purchased 3D eagle and flag file to a 30 by 40 inch blank, carves the full inch and a half depth, roughs with a half inch end mill at a half inch boundary offset, and finishes with a quarter inch ball nose. Total cut time is about ten hours, and it runs while the team works on other projects. Roy says the painting takes more of their labor than the machine setup does.
The same setup applies to furniture restoration shops, refinishers, custom cabinet makers, epoxy inlay artists, sign shops, and any two-person operation adding 3D carved product without hiring a designer.
ShopSabre CNC designs and builds CNC routers, plasma tables, fiber lasers, and tube cutters in Lakeville, Minnesota. ShopSabre Spotlight visits the shops running those machines and shows the work coming off them. Subscribe for more, and tell us in the comments what you would carve first.
00:00 – Restoring and Refinishing Old Furniture in Morehead City, North Carolina
00:46 – Why Refreshed Furnishings Runs a ShopSabre 23 with a Fourth Axis
01:36 – Sizing a Purchased 3D Eagle File to a Butcher Block Blank
03:52 – Setting the 3D Roughing Pass with a Half Inch End Mill
07:27 – Running the Finishing Pass with a Quarter Inch Ball Nose
09:39 – The Finished 3D Eagle After a Ten Hour Cut
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