CNC Milling

Pine Sawyers, Pratt, and Printing

Cal Brackin
3 min readMar 9, 2021

In high school, I was a house painter with my best friend, Jeff Pratt. During the summers, the heat brought out the pine beetles. Pine beetles are big, black, have long antennae, fly, and if you really mess with them they bite hard. When I wasn’t looking, Jeff would find a pine beetle, carefully pick it up and gently put it on the back of my shirt, right along the side or back where it was loose, where it would latch on. After a minute or so, that pine beetle would crawl up my shirt to my neck where I would yell and try to toss it off. It was like that all the time. We would work, but we would always throw a bit of play into it.

For this project, I decided I would CNC mill a Pine Sawyer stamp as a tribute to Jeff. He passed early this year and I miss him.

I started off drawing the Pine Sawyer in Procreate, inverted the colors, and brought the image into Illustrator for an Image Trace.

Pine Sawyer

I exported the image into a .svg and brought it into the Bantam Tools milling program. Here is an image of the interface and the settings that I used. To highlight, I was using a block of HDPE, which is what milk cartons are made from. The block was 5"x4"x.381". I set the CNC mill to carve down .1".

Changing the bits

I used three bits, shown here, starting with the 1/64" Flat End Mill bit. The CNC machine goes from smaller to larger bits on 2D images. The job took roughly 1.5 hours to complete.

The level of detail using this method is very high and I took this block over to block print on a few shirts.

The great thing about a stamp is that I could use it for printing on other items or embossing on paper or leather.

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Cal Brackin
Cal Brackin

Written by Cal Brackin

Illustrator & Designer at CMCI Studio

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