WoodMarvels Blog

Every once in a while, I get a complaint from a potential customer who can’t understand why they are unable to buy a digital file from WoodMarvels.com once for say 7.95$ and cut unlimited amount to sell in the back of their van or in local shops. I do sell commercial production licenses with wholesale discounts so it’s even less! To them, giving even a fraction of their income to support the designer (it’s not just me on WoodMarvels.com btw) [...]

I got a string of visitors and inquiries from China over the past few days – international companies there bypass the Chinese filters by using a VPN (as I did when I lived there) and guess what… if you search on Baidu.com – China’s largest and most popular search engine – for “laser project” you end-up with WoodMarvels.com as the #1 listing! http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=laser%20project&pn=70&tn=sitehao123&usm=1&rsv_page=1 I did the same search on Google but I don’t show-up on the first page sadly… I [...]

I have many goals this year for WoodMarvels.com and among the more ambitious ones is translating all my books into Chinese as well as the website. The reasons for this include: YouTube.com doesn’t work in China so all videos will have to be “doubled” meaning you see both the YouTube.com video and Youku.com (or Toudou.com)… I knew this was coming so I’ve been uploading to both sites for some time now. Online translation systems do a POOR job translating, just [...]

Hogar Rafael Ayau is an orphanage based out of Guatemala in Central America to help take care of disadvantaged children due to circumstances beyond their control. Alan Russell, the businessman, philanthropist, educator who his heavily involved with the Hogar Rafael Ayau orphanage though his leadership as Chairman of the Board at Liberty Fund approached me to see if there was a way WoodMarvels.com could contribute to their cause. When I was a kid, I really liked the idea of Santa [...]

On October 27th, 2007 – I started WoodMarvels.com and decided to blog about every new thing that happened on the site from the very start and upload videos for each and every product. On May 18th, 2011 – WoodMarvels.com hit it’s first milestone – a total of one million video views across a network of platforms. Today on lucky Friday the 13 of April, WoodMarvels.com hit a new milestone, now two million video views!!! The Hard Numbers Although these numbers [...]

It’s not everyday that you pickup a Chinese language book and inside, you find wooden laser cut designs but my wife’s new book has just that! Back Story For close to a year and a half, I had the adventure of living in China… beforehand living in a few other countries such as Korea, Philippines, Australia (more on that later) as well as a few stop overs along the way. WoodMarvels.com interestingly enough, started in a shoebox sized apartment in [...]

I started seeing a trend a few years back and it only seems to be getting worse… that of companies asking designers to submit amazing designs but having to pay for each entry. Reasons to charge Design websites and magazines, struggling to make ends meet, have discovered an easy way to get some creative work while generating revenue at the same time… using design competitions. Sometimes, if you read the fine print… they actually OWN your design even if you [...]

Some models are easier to translate from laser cutter to CNC than others. Here’ is a prime example for comparison… my Medieval Castle Bank vs Army Transport Truck (the 3D Assembly animations for both are at the bottom of this blog post). The Medieval Castle Bank was scaled-up to be CNC’able as well added dog bones but otherwise, nothing was changed on the model which I cut yesterday with my ShopBot Desktop. As you can see in the picture below, [...]

There was a thread about this on ShopBot and through it was so cool I’d share it here, you can view the video below.

As I embark on more difficult CNC models with interlocking parts, the toughest part about transitioning a design that was meant for laser into one meant for native CNC cutting is realizing the following key facts. Each cut with a CNC weakens the board Unlike laser where there is no resistance, you have a spinning router bit going thousands of revolutions a minute, ripping and pushing through wood. When I first started cutting with my ShopBot Desktop, I’d put in [...]