One of the first projects I posted on this blog was this letter blocks one.

The same mate recently had a second baby (this time a girl) and they asked me to make the same name blocks for her as well. In itself not a real challenge, but I ended up doing a few things differently.

First of all I purchased the wooden cubes instead of making them myself. These don’t really cost all that much and it saves me a lot of time and manual labor.

Secondly, because of my ‘new’ Z-axis, I didn’t have enough Z clearance anymore in order to fit a clamp + 6cm block. For this reason I purchased a low-profile vise. You can read the whole story about that in this post.

I could have gone with smaller blocks, but I really wanted to make them the same size as the original ones. Moreover, smaller blocks means that some spaces in between letter features become extremely narrow, which brings its own set of problems.

The vise is self-centering along my machine’s Y axis and has a symmetric ruler printed on top, which makes consistently placing and centering the wooden blocks a breeze.

Another huge improvement is that I switched to downcutting bits. Before I had to run my code relatively slow in order to minimize tearout. With these new bits, I could easily double the speed and DOC (I did one pass this time around instead of 2 last time!) without issues.

Off course different letters have different cutting times, but on average I can cut all 6 sides + some manual cleanup and sanding within 15 minutes.

I’ve gotten very positive feedback on these so I’m thinking about setting up a shop here and selling them to local people. Obviously, in order to do that, I had to make at least one for each letter of the alphabet, so that’s what I did.

Here’s another example: