The most important aspect of the woodworking I do is showcasing the wonderful color and tones of the Big Leaf Maple. The Eagle and Wolf scene was the first full project I completed, and I used a CNC machine to make the physical carvings in to wood.
The piece creation is accomplished by first roughing out the piece with a ¼ inch end mill router bit. This larger bit does the bulk of the work by following a roughing tool path that carves out the surface of the wood to get down within a quarter of an inch of desired depth of the finished piece.
Next, a finishing tool path is run on the CNC machine with a smooth ball nose 1/8-inch bit attached to the router. Since the first end mill bit did most of the work, the ball nose bit can move slower and precisely cuts out the fine details of the image. The outer edge is left alone to act as a natural picture frame.
The result is a beautiful creation which uses the spalted maple as naturally stunning canvas. Here is a simulated video of how it works. The software used is Vectric VCarve Desktop. The material is shown as Beech Dark to more closely resemble the tone of Spalted Big Leaf Maple. But of course, the true beauty can only be seen from the finished piece.