Ken Wines
Member
Other than making pens and pen blanks I occasionally take on work from other woodworkers. Currently I'm working on making 40 wooden tulips. They are walnut, approximately 2 1/2" in diameter and about 3 1/2" long. After the 3 1/2" square blanks are cut the length the corners are cut off on the bandsaw, the blanks are drilled and tapped to 3/8" - 16 thread, and then rounded down to 2.55" on the metal lathe. They are then mounted on a rotary fixture on CNC machine. They are machine in 2 step processes, the first being the roughing pass that removes the bulk of the waste wood. A 1/4" end mill is used for this and the machining time is about 36 minutes. The second step is the finishing pass that is cut using a 0.059" (1.5MM) tapered ball nose cutter stepping over 0.006" between parallel cuts. This process takes another 45 minutes. The back 5 still need the waste wood parted off.