scrappy

A work of woody-love made to recycle paper and delight Christian's preschool students.

There's a meta-blog here where I track my progress on modifying/improving this blog's content.

Prepping the SVG in Inkscape

Sun Jul 26 03:42:48 PM PDT 2026  by Daniel

Following the advice from Gemini, I need to fix/change svg/scrappy.svg, so I make a copy of him at svg/scrappy-wood.svg .

It takes quite a while, and many operations and questions to Claude about using Inkscape to get the drawing organized into layers per CNC operation.

Claude originally generated a bunch of individual .svg files, which I put into a directory called svg/scrappy-wood/.

The result is svg/scrappy-wood/scrappy.svg shown below (which doesn't look like much, but is actually much simplified from its original form).


The next step is to use something like FlatCAM to import the .svg file into a form which can be converted to g-code.

We get some advice from Claude AI on how to get from Inkscape to CNC machine.

2025-06-01 21:22 (UTC-7) by Daniel

In Claude AI's UI, I found the chat and shared it privately.

I opened the shared chat in another Chrome window and then used the singleFile Chrome extension to export the conversation with Claude AI to an html file.

But that file was weirdly completely blank visibly - although the file was huge

Tried a different approach. I copied and pasted from the browser into a new LibreOffice Writer document, and saved that document as HTML

That process involved using the File | Export function, and then changing the output format to be HTML.

Where are we?

Mon Jul 20 03:28:56 PM PDT 2026 by Daniel

Already kind of got started on the project before setting up this blog.

When the original scrappy came to us, he was in pretty sorry shape:

Seems he had been torn up and thrown away by janitorial staff.

We figured out his approximate dimensions and then cut out a new wooden body for him, based on those.

Now, his body is about 16" high, 18" wide, and 24" deep."

His new body is made mostly of 1/2" smooth veneer plywood from Home Depot, although we can't remember exactly which product it was.

20260720_160153.jpg

His bottom (underside) is made of a kind of outdoor-capable composite board. It's very strong.

20260720_160804.jpg

The bottom and sides are fit together with a router-cut trench

20260720_160825.jpg

Poor guy was missing his mustache and an eyebrow, but we put his face right as best we could:

20260627_133942.jpg

Then we traced his mouth and eye shape onto a piece of paper with a mechanical pencil.

20260627_134405.jpg

We used Inkscape to import a picture of his flattened face and used Inkscape to trace out the outline of his eyes and mouth.

svg/scrappy.svg

We then used Inkscape to fill in his mouth and pupils, thinking we might draw him onto the wood with a laser etcher/engraver.

svg/scrappy-laser.svg

But after much experimentation, we realized that the laser wasn't going to be the right tool for the job.

We might be able to use the laser to draw his pupils, but what we really need to do is carve recesses for the whites of his eyes, and then paint them white.

Then we'll cut a hole for his mouth. His teeth can be painted white too, but we decided not to recess them because that would weaken them a bit.