My CarveWright Has Arrived!!

Well, I was supposed to write this last night, but I was making designs for my CarveWright to carve out.  I found out Monday night that my CarveWright was going to be delivered on Tuesday.  I was literally dancing around the house because I was so excited.  So, Tuesday morning Fedex called at around 7:30 to make sure someone would be home at noon so they could deliver it.  After I put the kids on the bus I went into the garage to clear out a space for my new machine.  My original plan was to move my big metal desk out to the garage and use that as a workbench, but my desk weighs about 300 lbs and the monitor on top of it weighs another 300 so it's not going to get moved without some help.  I looked around the garage for something that I could set it on.  I had all the pieces to a couch that I was making a couple years ago and decided that I could use the parts to make a workbench.  It didn't take too much modification to convert from couch to workbench and I almost had finished by noon.  The Fedex truck arrived at precisely noon!  He must have been waiting around the corner because it was exactly 12:00 when he arrived.  I finished my workbench and moved the machine into the garage.

The CarveWright has a lot of built in functions that can be really useful without having to make a design on the computer.  The first thing I did was use the cross-cut function to cut a board to exactly 2 feet.  My first attempt made a 2 inch cut, but shortly later I had a 2 foot long board.  I tried to load the software onto the PC that I set up on my workbench, but the disc got damaged in shipping.  I called the company and they are going to ship me a new disc for free.  I had already downloaded the Mac version of the software on my other computer so this didn't set me back too much.  The first project that I made was a sign for Otto's room.  I chose a font and selected the option to outline the text, then I gave the text an arc.  I just wanted to try a simple project for my first try.  It took the machine about 16 minutes to carve the text onto a 10.24x24 inch board.  Pretty quick, and it looked way better than I could have done by hand.  

My second project was to carve an image onto the board.  Rachel chose a picture of Otto and I used the software to place the image on the board.  I didn't spend much time trying to make the image look perfect, I just wanted to see what the machine could do.  I was impressed at the quality of the image.  It took about 17 minutes to carve Otto's face at a depth of .25 inch in a 3x5 inch box.  

That wasn't the only thing that we did yesterday, but that's what I was most excited about :-)

Shortly after my machine arrived, we went into town to get gas and return the bottles.  Rachel has been collecting the gas coupons from Shaws.  We filled the car up and two gas cans, totaling 19.962 gallons.  The total price was around $75.  With the coupons we only spent $35 for gas.  I guess it pays off to save those coupons.

Last night we went to see Speed Racer.  The critics that have been giving this movie a bad rating must have been watching a different movie.  Speed Racer was excellent!  However, I am a huge Speed Racer fan, I do own the complete cartoon series (all five volumes).  The whole family really likes Speed Racer, so it was a good movie for us to see together.  The movie stayed very true to the cartoon.  The plot of the movie and the situations that Speed found himself in all could have happened in the series.  I had a couple of issues with some of the facts in the movie.  The GRX, the fastest car on earth, could not have been driven in a race.  The GRX is capable of speeds greater that human reflexes can handle.  Four drivers died when testing the GRX.  Just a small detail. but it bothered me.  They should have just left out the GRX from the movie.  It was still a great movie though.  We had the entire theatre to ourselves which was helpful for Otto, who didn't want to sit still during the slow parts.