I race on a sailboat called Scuttlebutt at Cedar Island Yacht Club. In 2025 we had a good season – first in spring, summer, fall, overall, and line honours. I wanted to make something for the crew to mark it, so I designed and made a set of custom brass awards through my manufacturing business Whatsit Manufacturing Co..

The result is a 48mm brass award with a spinnaker pattern on the front and a compass rose on the back, filled with colored epoxy to match the actual sail colors, mounted in an engraved spalted maple plate. I made eight in total – five for the crew and three that ended up as test pieces.

I wanted to use Claude Code to help write blog posts for this site. The V-carving post was the first real test – a technical post about building V-carving support in MapleCAM, covering custom libraries, algorithm design, and two months of development. I expected it to take an hour or two. It took all day – about 12 hours wall-clock, 9 hours active – across five sessions.

The post came out well, but the process of getting there was rough. This is what happened and what I changed for next time.

MapleCAM is a desktop CAM application I built for my LongMill CNC router. It's written in Java, generates G-code for GRBL and LinuxCNC, and handles routing, laser, and V-carving operations. It runs on Linux, requires no cloud account, and is free to download.

I use my CNC for a lot of things, but a surprising number of them end up requiring V-carving for text. V-carving turned out to be the operation that took the most work to get right – not just the toolpath generation itself, but writing two custom libraries and a six-phase optimizer to get there. This post is about that process: what I tried, what failed, and how the pieces eventually came together.

I spent this weekend building a pair of MeshCore radios. MeshCore is a decentralized mesh networking platform that uses LoRa radio hardware for secure text-based communications - no internet required. Unlike Meshtastic where every node relays traffic for every other node, MeshCore only relays through dedicated repeater nodes. This makes the network potentially more efficient and reliable - regular nodes aren't bogged down forwarding everyone else's messages.

The build was based on Heltec V3 boards. I grabbed a pair of kits from Amazon along with some better antennas, 3D printed cases for them, and used batteries I already had on hand. The whole thing came together over the weekend without too much trouble.

I've been working on a side project for a while now: Whatsit Manufacturing Co. is my small custom manufacturing business, specializing in custom-designed handmade products and made-to-order items.

The tagline is "fine dohickies and thingamabobs." Someone comes to me with an idea - a specialized tool, a unique gift, a one-of-a-kind solution to a problem - and I design and build it from scratch. I also have a small catalog of stock products that can be customized.