My attempt at switch plates

[RayTrek]

My method to this project

The carves came out pretty good but I have a bit to go in using the right method of designer to achieve less clean up, especially with the “Decora” rectangular carve out and the mounting holes.
I have been in electronics and control in the ski lift industry for over 20 years and been doing residential electrical spare time for 25 years and now trying to do it full time, and the one thing I have noticed is there are few choices in switch plates. So am trying to create a line of custom covers, just for fun.
I have include MPC file that I used for carve and if anyone would like to improve on it please post it again with fixes.
I have about 40 cover designs built in designer but Not there yet with layout.
If there is interest I will post more, with fixes.

Thanks to all of you for getting me as far as I have in the learning carve,
Cheers to all, Ray Ver. 1.126

[twinpeaksenterprises, LLC]

Nice work there Ray, very impressive! Kinda curious though what are the white ones made of. Is that a corian or plastic? I thought about making some corian ones to cover my backspashes and match my counter tops. I think that would come out nice. Also do you have a back relief in them? Ill look at the file. If i see any improvements ill let you know. But they look pretty darn good to me.. Keep up the good work!

[IM2HAPPI]

If its wildlife Ray I would love any of them, thanks so much for the deer. What type of wood, would you recommend carving this out of ?
Barb

[auriclux]

Switchplates must be a common idea, as I'm trying some for around my house and maybe for friends.

Good News - what I have fits.

Bad News - the carving is giving me fits.

As you can see from the pix, the resulting plates fit on the wall over the Decora paddles and the screw holes line up - a minor miracle in my mind. I didn't do a backside carve region because of the other issues. But the plates snapped out of the blank and cleaned up pretty good with a little whittling. A pass with some sandpaper and poly wipe and all woud be great, except ...

... you can also see that most of the small carvings that I wanted to include drilled through the material. And the machine simply choked on the lettering of the final plate. My .mpc file is too large to upload, but basically I tried to put a few letters on on the top and bottom of a 1-gang plate.

So the help I seek is this: How can I best carve small shallow designs and lettering with the CC/CW? Is there a tip sheet already around somewhere?

Also, I used my scanner to scan a 1-gang and 2-gang Decora plate and can post that file if there is interest.


Thanks.

[RayTrek]

Hello Auriclux
Nice job on getting the toggles and holes to line up I put the grid in design and used the pointer Front face numbers to measure mine. I don't no if there is a better way.
As far as your depth of carve on your patterns it may be as simple as changing the depth of pattern in design could see it better with your mpc file. I have seen some write up on the subject. The same for me on the text need to see the file. Some one may be able to answer your Q better then I
I really like your "Things I've learned so far" Hot tips
Talk Later and thanks for the learning carve_ Ray

[sirsumm]

Auriclux,
I would be interested in the scans you made of the switch plates. It might be interesting to carve textures on the plates. I saw that there have been some recent posts on texturing.

Jason

[auriclux]

This is the raw scan I made of Decora switch plates. For sizing, I exported to jpeg, cropped, made sure that the vertical dimension was 4.5", checked for that dimension again in Designer and called that good.

Through all that, I think that I will have to shrink the mounting screw holes, and, for some reason, the central cut for the paddle on the single.

It occurs to me just now that if I substitute a cut for that central hole, the carve time might reduce.

And thanks for the props on my sig. It seems we all ask these same questions the first week signing on here.

... And the upload manager looks to not support .mpw files. Hmmmm ... how 'bout a .zip? // Nope. Too big, even zipped. Same size file actually. I'm sorry, I guess that I cannot post my scan files.

[mtylerfl]

Hello,

Just do a screen shot of your scan (or Designer) display (Alt+Prnt Scrn) save it as a graphic, then post it on the forum as normal. That's the method we "all" use to allow others to view our work as it appears in the software.

[auriclux]

Was I presumptuous in my use of the word 'all'? I apologize if I gave any offense.

But thanks for the presentation tip. What I did is export the scan from designer and then use photoshop to convert to a jpeg in greyscale mode.

Hope this helps.

Also, funny thing - in doing a search for machine life, I found an older thread on switchplates.

[mtylerfl]

Was I presumptuous in my use of the word 'all'? I apologize if I gave any offense.

??? - no apology necessary - and most certainly no offense taken. I guess I'm confused