I designed a two-finger ring with a flat top surface for engraving/writing/drawing/sticking things onto. It’s designed to fit my middle and ring fingers.

I began with a quick planning phase on paper:

Completed the Vectorworks design in under 30 minutes. I placed the design in the desired position and orientation relative to the origin point even though that’s to be done in the CAM software:

I went and purchased some poplar from Metropolitan Lumber in SoHo. I was told poplar was the next best thing from pine, and I think it looks great for the price. The minimum purchasing length was 8′, so that’s what I got, at 4″ width and 1.75″ thickness:

I cut a 6″ slice to work with:

I had trouble orienting the design so that the tabs would appear on the correct axis… or rather, the material’s proportions were somehow off. As you can see in the image below, two of the tabs don’t appear to be attached to surrounding material. Note that I also lied to the CAM software by an inconsequential .27″ of the material’s X width:

I decided to move forward anyway. What the cut would look like:

After installing the 1/4″ round-tip end mill, I was ready to start cutting:

It took 5-10 minutes just to reach the material surface:

The poplar seemed to be cutting pretty nicely:

Beginning the other side:

RIP:

I think the tabs failed to do their job? They were either too thin, or there weren’t enough of them? Maybe the two of them that appeared not to attach to anything in the CAM software were actually not attached to anything?

The backside of the piece is completely sliced off… the top surface of the ring should protrude from the finger slot portion by .25″:

The first side came out perfectly:

Although a failure, this was of course a productive learning experience. I’m still unsure what exactly went wrong, but in the future I think I can mitigate such issues by considering the how the tabs work when designing the piece.