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.

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.