Beautiful mounted animal head - in wood
How to CNC machine your own 'hunting' trophy.
This mounted animal head has been made from wood - an impressive DeskProto result!
This page shows a great solution for people that do not like hunting wild animals but still want to have a mounted animal head as room decoration: create one in wood. You will agree that this result looks better than the stuffed head of a real animal !
The trophy has been created by hobby user Jack van der Sluijs (the Netherlands). He bought his DeskProto hobby license in 2020, and this project shows that since that time he acquired advanced CNC skills. While he uses a 3-axis CNC milling machine, the ox still looks very alive and threedimensional. Thanks for sharing this result!
Jack has bought the 3D geometry file in the Turbosquid webshop: above left you can see the STL file in Turbosquid. The file contains 500,000 triangles, and is 24.4 MB large.
Toolpaths for the backside of the head: first roughing (in layers), then finishing.
As you can see in the DeskProto screenshots above, the bull's head has a flat backside. The original STL file contains a hollow geometry (a thin shell, optimized for 3D printing). Jack made it a solid part by adding the flat backside surface, using the Meshmixer software (no longer available).
Jack smartly created the suggestion of a complete head by machining only the most important details from the back side: the horns and the area on both 'cheeks' and below the chin. The remaining flat surface is large enough to again securely clamp the block, after flipping it to machine the front side.
The project shows an advanced way of two-sided machining, as Jack managed to keep the block perfectly aligned when flipping it, and to exactly set the zero point in order to make both sides match.
Finishing toolpaths for the front side, with a tapered cutter, excluding the horns.
The front side as well has first been machined with a thick cutter, to quickly remove material (roughing). For finishing Jack used a tapered cutter, as that combines stability with the small tip that is needed for the details.
The two horns have been done in a separate operation, as his tapered cutter was no long enough. As you can see all around the part the toolpaths go down to ambient level: when doing so at the tip of the horn the collet would collide with the horn. Using the Ambient skipping option to remove these vertical movements does not work well with a tapered cutter. Jack used a second operation, with a higher value for the minimum Z of the Area to be machined. Note that this could also have been solved using the Collet collision check that DeskProto offers.
Finishing the front side with a tapered cutter. The finishing toolpath is removing the roughing skin.
The machine is a home-made 3-axis machine, using the PlanetCNC control software. Roughing has been done with a 6 mm diameter cutter, and for finishing a tapered cutter with a 1 mm tip has been used. The wood for this project is oak: slats of 18 mm thick that have been glued to form the block.
In the photo above you can clearly see two wooden slats below the part: the block has been screwed on these slats, and these have been clamped onto the machine's working table
The shield on which the head is mounted: STL with toolpaths and left the result.
The shield is a design by Jack, which he has created in FreeCAD. After exporting as STL DeskProto could simply create the toolpaths.
The head has been mounted on the shield with a spacer in-between, tilting the head a bit to make it look downward. This achieves a stunningly spatial effect in the resulting 'hunting trophy':
The resulting mounted bull's head: a stunning 'true-to-life' trophy!
The dimensions of this mounted head (including the shield) are 400 x 310 x 120 mm (height, width, thickness), which is ca 16 x 12.5 x 5 inches. It has been finished by applying a protective woodstain, in three colors.
Jack lives in a Dutch village called Ossendrecht. In carnival time the inhabitants call themselves the 'Ossekoppen' - in English the 'Ox heads'. Sufficient reason to create this mounted ox head.