The food tray created by one of our MIY MakerSpace clients, Jacques Basset, in our fab lab, is amazingly done. The food tray is used for a dinner set of steak sur ardoise which is a delicacy in France, and Switzerland. The dish, steak sur ardoise, is prepared differently, wherein a rock is put into an oven for an hour at full heat then pulled out of the oven and raw meat is cooked at the table by the rock. There are food trays for this delicacy that are available commercially, but without a doubt, Mr. Basset’s creation is better. The customization he did is very precise, and so the cutting is so refined.
Mr. Basset created this food tray on one weekend, not just as a project, but as a gift to his loving wife. The 20mm thick food tray is made in wood and treated with varnish to seal it for washing. I am sure Mrs. Basset was amazed at how her husband produced it.
In our FabLab, we have a lot of tools to use to create a Food Tray project. Mr. Basset chose to use the 2009 Badog Artisan 55 milling machine with a 1700x1100mm cutting size. The 2009 Badog Artisan 55 milling machine has a massive table that satisfied his space. It produces precise cuts no matter where you do the cutting. The good thing about this milling machine, it’s software package has a simplified interface. Mr. Basset, also, discussed his cutting parameters. The cutting parameters are 6mm end mill, 24mm long with 2 teeth (downward spiral milling bit), Milling head: 4.5 kW, Speed of cut: 1900mm/min, and 10mm per pass.
It was not hard for him to do his project as many say, our machine is easy to work with. With a great strategy, the food tray project of Mr. Basset was created beautifully. Strategy? You may think that is why there’s a strategy involved. Well, you read it right, strategy is a good thing to have before performing any action with CNC milling. Strategy is very important in working with a project to get a good result. It is like being careful because a bad move may break the wood or may change the wood into a not expected form.
Aside from strategies, some techniques can be used, and other options to come up with your desired output.
The food tray comes with additional stuff. As you can see, those are the knife, basket for the fries, and bowls for the sauce of the fries, and they suited perfectly in the food tray. The measurement he coded into the program gave him the right dimension and the right size after the milling process. How do you think he came up with a perfect cutting for those additional materials? Getting the right sizes of materials to attach or place in a project produces a fantastic result. Getting the right sizes would give you an idea of how much you should add in measurement, to fit material on your project’s carved area (which will you place the item). If you won’t add an extra space from your material’s original measurement may cause a problem, like unease of placing the item into the carved area since the carved area is just as big as the material, and so on.
Another good technique is to print using a paper printer to allow yourself to check if the computer gets the right size you wanted the wood to be carved with. It is also advisable to use the same unit of measurement for your trial print on paper, and your final output (which will be milled by a CNC machine). The reason why it is advisable to use the same unit of measurement is there will be no difference in the sizes, because whenever you convert a size from unit to unit it may give you a bit of a size difference.
Jacques Basset’s creation
Other’s creation for sale commercially.
We are not surprised by the result of the food tray Mr. Basset has created. The integration of his skills and our machine’s precision towards milling provide a great result. If you are planning to make your food tray or any other thing you would like to produce, we are always here to assist you. Newbie, or not, our expertise would love to help you get the best of your work.