My wife and I decided that we were spending far too much money on factory-carved objects, so we bought our own CNC router — a 1000mm X-Carve from Inventables.

I finished setting it up today, and the first carving on the agenda was a replacement insert for my daughter’s doll bunk bed:

The bed broke when someone stood on the bed to reach a shelf they weren’t supposed to reach. It would be a simple matter to cut out a new insert with a jigsaw, but where’s the fun and repeatable automation in that?

This particular bed is the Badger Basket Doll Bunk Bed, but I presume most doll bunk beds use a similar construction. I measured the broken insert, modeled it as a 2-D object in OpenSCAD, and exported an SVG file.

Inventables has Web-based modeling software called Easel that also manages the carving. I imported my SVG, set the dimensions, and chose my material and bit.

Coincidentally, the backer board from my daughter’s old changing table is made from the same material as the broken insert, so I cut the new one out of that. It’s the circle of life!

(Ignore the double-cut on the far edge. That was from a false start that I aborted to fix a clamping issue.)

The new insert is a perfect match for the old one:

And the bed is as good as new:

The source code for this doll bunk bed insert is available on GitHub.