Skill Builder: milling
Week 2 Skill Builder:
For this skill builder I decided to cut an Adinkra symbol out of wood. Adinkras are symbols from West Africa that communicate concepts and aphorisms. These characters tend to use simple shapes that I thought would translate well for my first milling project. The symbol I chose is Owia Kokroko. This symbol looks like the sun and is meant to encourage people to draw strength and vitality from the sun [1]. In general I’ve been interested in exploring Sun motifs as a symbol for futurity which was part of the appeal. However, I also liked this symbol for my first milling because it sometimes is drawn with a gear-like shape, which reminded me of some of the other milling projects being made in this class [2].
Supply List:
Plywood
Digital Calipers
Other Mill
1/8” Flat End Mill
Double Sided Tape
Sandpaper
The Process
I started off by finding an image of an Owia Kokroko on google and then followed a tutorial to convert it into an editable vector image in illustrator [3]. I saved three separate SVG files so the mill would move through three seperate operations.
For my material I grabbed a 4.527” x 4.430” x 0.2334” piece of plywood. After taping it down to the table of the Other Mill, homing the machine, and touching the tool off I loaded my SVGs to the program. I then adjusted the X and Y offsets so the three operations sat properly within one another. After running through the process once I ended up running the last operation, cutting out the circle, one more time after adjust thing Z-offset a bit because it had not gone all the way through the wood. Taking it down a few fractions of a millimeter was enough to cut it out.
After cleaning up in the shop, I used 120 grit sand paper to sand the edges of the shape and its cutouts.
Conclusion
This skill builder ran pretty smoothly. The only issue I really had was that it took me 30 mins to figure out how to turn on the machine. It wasn’t recorded in the steps in the class notes or the skill builder directions; none of the youtube tutorials for other mills I found included this step. Eventually I texted two of my classmates who had used it before to get the answer: there’s an on switch tucked in a cutout at the back of the machine next to a plug [4].
One question I do have is why were the three operations not in line directly from the SVG upload even though their placements did line up on the original artboards?
Sources:
[1] https://www.adinkrabrand.com/blogs/portfolio/owia-kokroko-greatness-of-the-sun
[2] https://www.leiac.me/2022/2022-09-14_bantam-skillbuilder/
[3] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/convert-image-vector-illustrator/
