Heart Shaped Oak Necklace and Earings.

In this Instructable I will show you how I make some Heart shaped Necklaces with Matching Ear Rings out of a piece of 6mm Oak sheet, but it could be any type of wood, its what I had to hand.

With some imagination you could use walnut and oak or any different combinations of wood for different designs etc.

Ideally a CNC machine is needed to make the delicate cuts needed but I believe someone who is handy with a scroll saw could easily make these, with the ear rings being that small and me being not too handy with a scroll saw I would fear for my fingers!

I will be using Vetric Cut2D for the design and Toolpaths

All the cuts are profile cuts and wont create much dust but please ensure you have the correct PPE (Personal Protective Equipment in place) for CNC Machines.

Eye and Ear Protection.

Dust mask rated for the work you are carrying out.

CNC Machine(Ox CNC)

Oak sheet(In this case its 6mm)

1mm CNC flat bottom router bit.

Black waxed string for the necklace.

Component parts for the Ear rings

Small Hand drill and drill bits

CA Glue and Accelerator.

Fine sandpaper.

As usual the first thing we do in Vetric is to input the dimensions and thickness of the wood we are using, In this case is 6mm, I'm starting in the bottom left corner of the sheet, this will be the zero starting point on the CNC.

Although the sheet is much bigger than this, I just make the dimensions 100m Length and Depth 50mm everything will be cut out in the bottom left corner.

With the dimension and starting point set we can now move onto the design, find a copyright free Heart image you like and save it to your desk top.

Our first heart will be for the necklace.

Within Vetric find the Import Bitmap Tab and find your heart and Import it into the design, you will find it will be central in your workpiece and to the extreme edges, this is ok, the heart will already be highlighed so find the Trace bitmap tab and adjust the settings as necessary, I usually just go with the black and white settings, Preview and close if you are happy with the trace.

Clicking away from the Heart, somewhere just outside the heart will highlight the original bitmap, delete this leaving you with just the traced portion of the Bitmap, you will probably notice that there are double lines to the Heart, click on one and delete, we only need an outline.

I'm going for a heart within a heart so click on the heart outline and then right click copy and paste, it pastes the copy on top of the heart, just grab the box In the centre of the copied heart and move away, we need to shrink this so it fits within our heart, dragging a corner inwards of the highlighted heart will make it smaller, when satisfied with the size then drag it into the design and centralize.

Between the 2 hearts a 2mm hole is needed for the waxed string to go through, equal distance between the 2 hearts will be fine, if it appears to close, the centre heart could always be lowered slightly, that's the necklace heart sketch completed, we now need to design the Earings.

What we can do here is Highlight all of the Necklace heart and copy this, then paste and move it away from the original.

Delete the 2mm hole at this point, we don't need it for the earrings, Highlight all of the design and drag a corner inwards to a point where they look like earrings in prospective to the Necklace, when happy, copy that and paste and then organise the hearts on the sheet for the cutting process.

Lets move onto the Toolpath:

In this section we can create one profile toolpath to cut everything out in one go, I like it when it falls like this.

Initially we set the depth of cut, in this case its 6.4mm to cut right through the material, our CNC router bit is 1.5mm set feeds and speeds as you wish but keep them low.

Click on the Tab box and add tabs, I delete or add any Tabs at this point and move any away which are in Tight angles of the hearts, I delete all the tabs around the hole for the necklace heart as well, the profile @ 2mm will cut the wood from the hole.

We can now Highlight all components and calculate, the animation will show tabs etc, all that's left to do is rename the design, and save, then send to the CNC Machine.

Onto the CNC Machine.

Using Univeral G.code sender to translate and send the code in this case, the CNC runs off a Raspberry Pi in my Garage/Workshop, I can send files to it from the House or Shed, where I have a Laptop in both locations.

With the CNC creating dust which is not good for computers, The Raspberry Pi has no moving parts so its ideal for this purpose, Its on blue tooth to the cnc controller and also a Bluetooth mini Keyboard for toggling the CNC.

The 6mm sheet is secured at both ends with screwed wooden pieces, nothing fancy needed here.

The bottom left of the sheet is our starting point, and with the bit just slightly above the wood, a piece of paper is used for the correct height, reset zero, I then move the router up and fit the dust boot then use return to zero tab.

Browse for the file in the Raspberry pi and then with Vacuum and Router energised cut out the design.

Onto the final stage.

The final part of this project is to give the individual pieces a light sanding, or you could choose to round off the edges etc, the choice is yours.

After sanding Its the boiled linseed oil finish for these hearts(Can be any Finish you want) and the final part is to fit the necklace waxed cotton for the heart with 2 sliding knots, and for the Ear rings its some wire bails I bought online from a well known vendor of said cheap oriental items:) I use a small hand drill with a tiny drill to drill a hole through the top centre of the earring, then the part which goes into the hole in the Earings is cut to size and just secured with CA glue and Accelerator.

There you have it! Some nice looking not run of the mill real Oak Necklaces and hearts for not much effort!

Might try doing some 4 Leaf Clovers next with green resin centres..... Watch this space..

Hope you enjoyed this Instructable and it's given you some ideas, and finally thanks for looking in as always..