Here is my latest project, a skateboard holder for my daughters room.  I decided to try my hand at carving plywood with some cheap big box store wood I had laying around from a previous project.  My first attempt was a disaster, but after dialing in the settings a bit I managed to get through it with minimal issues.

I was going for a bit of an artistic look, and I wanted something that would not bash a hole in your forehead if you ran into it.  Also, for some reason my daughter wanted it to double as a shelf.

Cheap plywood is tough to work with but I found a few tricks:

• Add a roughing pass to your profiles, leave around 1mm of space for the final cut.  The wood is going to split, this minimizes the chances of the split ending in the final part.
• Take warping into account.  This is not MDF, the wood will be higher in some areas than in others.  I added an extra mm of depth to my cut and that seemed to be enough.
• Oversize the tabs, I made mine 4mm wide and 6mm high.  The plies are very soft, you want to hit more than one for sure or they will snap.
• Round the corners to minimize splitting.
• Conventional cut seems to give a better finish, but I'm not 100% positive on this one.  I made a lot of changes between my first and second attempt, this may be a red herring.

I just got some Baltic birch in today, hopefully it carves better than this wood, but still this was passible.