One final tolerance test I wanted to do was to make another 3D object. I was getting tired of making the same cube over and over again, so I went to Thingiverse to find some more interesting 3D models to cut. I found a penguin pretty quick and liked it for its low poly (amount of geometry faces), and that the emperor penguin is one of my favorite animals.
The other day I ordered some new bits from @mscdirect (found through an online recommendation for their price and quality) and had some new tools to use. I got a 1/8" ball bit, 1/8 square 3 flute endmill, and a 1/8" 3 flute bullnose endmill. For this project, I was only going to use the ball endmill as it would leave an immaculate surface finish.
The first three faces it cut everything went fine. However, when it went to the forth face, the one where the clamp protruded, I ran into an issue. The spindle hit the workholding and threw off the machine which ended with my endmill crashing into the stock, I quickly shut it down and had to reboot it to work correctly.
Unfortunately, due to the wood I had at the time, I couldn't just raise the entire penguin to be higher so the spindle wouldn't crash again, so I had to make due and set in some additional restrictions on where it could machine. Since I restricted the toolpath, I couldn't reach the feet and so had to use another operation from the side.
Other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing, and I was able to get a very clean and seamless transition from each face. I did two different kinds of toolpaths for this operation, adaptive clearing for the bulk of the material removal, and then a scallop toolpath to get the surface finish. Overall I'm delighted with the outcome, and it's perfect not counting where the ball mill crashed into its arm.