I made a knife box as a 75th birthday gift for Brian, through Whatsit Manufacturing Co.. It's a two-piece set – a spalted maple bed and a mulberry cover – sized to a specific Japanese chef knife and its tooled leather sheath. The cover has a traditional Asanoha pattern routed into the top face and filled with white dyed epoxy. A brass disc engraved with "75" sits in a pocket in the bed. The cover doubles as a display frame when flipped upside-down, with the mulberry border framing the spalted maple.

MapleCAM is a desktop CAM application I built for my LongMill CNC router. I wrote about the V-carving implementation previously.

I split toolpath generation into two stages: operations produce cutting geometry, and a central planner handles everything else. The planner also maintains a 3D voxel model of the stock, carving it as it goes, so transition decisions are based on what material has actually been removed. The result is 56% less machining time on a real project, almost entirely from smarter transitions between cuts.

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.