Wax Seal

I love sending people mail, and am known for embellishing my letters with wax seals to give it an extra bit of whimsy. I have also found an alternative use for my collection of seals to decorate my home-made pastries with chocolate medallions giving it the look of goods hailing from a professional bakery.

With both these uses I have long wanted to make a slew of custom seal designs, and for some reason keep pushing myself to use smaller and smaller endmills.

Originally this project had started off with a different design – based on the CAD symbol used by McMaster-Carr to indicate a .STEP file is available for download, but in the process I learned a valuable lesson that I need to use my brain a little more when it comes to thinking about the application. Embarrassed to say I forgot to mirror the text and didn’t realize my mistake until revealing the first wax seal. Not even mentioning the 3 1/32″ endmills I broke in the process…

This resulted in a very bruised ego and I decided to focus my attention on a less complicated design while I figured out my speeds/feeds for a nicer finish and less broken bits. Adopting the paper plane design I have made a few other art pieces from seemed like a good choice knowing I wouldn’t run into the embarrassment of having to mirror the image.

It also turns out shrinking the depth cut by 0.002″ makes the world of difference between no broken endmills and constantly breaking endmills.

I do eventually plan on re-running the CAD logo design, as well as turning the remainder of the material on the lathe for a nicer form and handle. But for now, excited with the current results.