Christmas Tree Decorations 12 Projects of Christmas

The files for this project are compatible with VCarve Pro 7.5 and Aspire 4.5. I got hold of some scrap plywood that was knocking around the labs room and sprayed one piece silver and one red as the main color for my decorations. I was not 100% sure whether the machined areas would give enough contrast so decided to mask the top of the material to give me an easier option to finish those areas if needed.
This project was probably the easiest one I’ve worked on – and the cool thing about it was that we had no tool changes too! So using a 0.125” end mill, I first ran the toolpath to cut the holes for the string followed by a profile toolpath to run the patterns - going in at a cut depth of 0.05 Profiling – On the vector. To finish I ran a profile pass to cut the parts out. The whole sheet of 6 decorations only took about 7 minutes to cut.
Unfortunately when profiling or pocketing into ply you never really know the state of the sheet that’s going to be revealed. In this case I was pretty lucky with the ply on the red set as it cut down to a light colored area of ply which gave the contrast I was looking for. Unfortunately the silver version wasn’t so pretty… not to worry! So I dug out some white modeling paint and painted the striped areas on the decorations. I’m sure any other paints would work too. I chose the modeling paint as it has a runny consistency so it would be easier for me to run the brush through all of the patterned areas.

Once the paint had dried it was time to take the masking material off, you may have to be careful with this as I learnt the more spray you have on the better (as it was for the red versions) however I didn’t apply a thick enough coat of the silver color and thus resulted in areas being pulled away by the mask which required them to be re-painted by hand. The last thing to do was to find some Christmassy coloured string (silver) and tie them through the holes ready to hang on the office tree!