New Product - "CMT 3D Router Carver System™"

Beth and I worked on Christmas presents this last week.  Two weeks ago we had our first use of the CMT 3D Router Carver System. As we looked at the sample doors we had done, an idea for presents started to develop. How about a cheese and cracker board — with some hand carvings to decorate the board?    We had some Lyptus that we had used for finishing samples. We cut one up, and Beth is gluing it up so that it will be ready for when we complete our design thinking.
	Doing a search on-line gave us some curve ideas. If we could come up with a design, we could probably make out own templates to use with the carver.
Somewhere in the creative process, it dawned on us that the template we had used on the sample door might work quite well if we just "altered" it a bit. We used the laptop and a paint program to capture the drawing from the CMT website, cut it in half and turned one half around....and then spread them out so that we could put a tile in the center. It looked good on paper.
	Once we saw what we wanted on the laptop, we took our sample door and cut it apart and then played around with it until we started to like the dimensions.
We had left room for a 4"X 4" tile and hoped that we could find a tile that size that would work. My wife and I made a run to the local tile store and were very lucky to find a dozen of colorful hand painted tiles that someone had ordered and not picked up. At $7 each, they made a great addition to the design.
	Knowing what we wanted to do, Beth and I went to the templates to see how we could make 12 of these boards with zero defects. It will mean making a jig for the jig so that the carvings will be made in the right places and direction. There are also portions of the template that will not be used. We also will want to route "dished" areas to hold the crackers. Finally, we will round off the outside shape. Each of those things will be great use of the plunge router and the router table. That's for next week.