Make a Turkey Trinquet Dish with a CNC Router for Thanksgiving
We wanted to do a fun project for Thanksgiving this year so we made an easy and awesome 1″ thick cherry turkey sign or trinquet tray with our tabletop CNC router. Here are some of the details:
I started by first finding a clipart on google and vectorizing the image, re-sizing it and then offseting the outter vector twice for the bowl shape. I separated the offest vectors and the engraved vectors by moving them to 2 separate layers for different tool paths.
Once everything was laid out, I started by programming the roundover tool for both the inside and outside edges of the bowl. This was the amana 56170 18″ radius roundover tool. Next I used a core box cutter, a ballnose endmill to recess the material inside. I did this in 2 passes so I could maintain a faster feed rate throughout the cut.
When using this bit, we programmed the cut to use a very tiny step over, about 8% of the tools diameter to try and get as flat of a bottom as possible. Normally, you could use a standard endmill for this type of cut, but because I wanted there to be some curvature on the inside edges of the bowl, I decided to use this tool.
After removing all the material from the bowl, I switched over to the Techno engraving bit (part #EN1818-30) for the inner detailing. From my experience with using these types of tools in hardwood, like this piece of cherry, you will get a much cleaner channel if the cutter passes through in both directions. Just a tip!
So anyway, for this reason, I started by climb milling the engraved part and finished by conventional milling the art work. This left all the channels clean and with no blowout.
Finally, we cut the piece out using the Techno CNC 1/4″ compression bit (part #CM141478). This bit cut through the cherry like absolute butter – running our HDII tabletop at 70 ipm with a spindle speed of 14,000 rpm. While programming, I was a little nervous that such a small cut out enduring cutting forces from a 1/4″ cutter may cause the piece to break free from the vacuum table, so I did program a skin pass, where I took 2 aggressive 0.49″ passes through the material and left a 0.02 skin at the bottom to be cut out last. This type of strategy allows you to cut small parts off while using vacuum hold down and reduces the cutting forces tremendously which keeps the part on the table.
So we hope you enjoyed this project! If you decide to play around with your router today and make a similar trinquet dish, tag us so we can see and share your project! Have a happy thanksgiving guys!
