Week 8 - Computer-Controlled Machining

Assignment

* Group assignment
    * test runout, 
    * alignment, 
    * speeds, 
    * feeds, 
    * and toolpaths for your machine

* Individual assignment
    * make something big

Individual Assignment

This week for making a big thing on the larger CNC machine at the University, I wanted to make a small set of shelves for my bathroom at home, which currently collects all kinds of bottles and things all about the place.

This will be a fairly 'small' big things. These shelves will go at the end of the bath (Image below) in a space 70cm wide; the bath is 54cm tall.

There is a small ledge which is 15cm tall.

Having measured the space and considered some ideas in my head, i turned to Solidworks my prefered CAD suite to model the parts required.

I created the first two parts, a simple shelf and side part.

It was here I ran into some issues as I relayed to a friend after trying some different things:

my solidworks is really broken and I've no idea why, how, or what to do about it, and google seems to have no idea. middle click drag to rotate model - I am trying to do mates in an assembly. pretty simple really I thought. But seemingly not, my middle click drag has decided that it is actually going to just zoom in and out instead of rotating the model. Whilst that's slightly inconvenient there are other ways to rotate a model, so I bind the rotating and selecting tools to the rightclick drag tool menu thing, go into the mate tool, select the first face, switch to rotate to move the model round to select the other one on the back side of the model, and now I am locked into the rotate tool because I'm inside the mate and can no longer select anything.... The options as they should be, and Something else that might be relevant Don't really make any sense. I've no idea what I might've done or how to fix it.

So I'm at a sort of roadblock without trying other CAD packages, but I've sort of run out of time this week. I will instead by trying reinstalling Solidworks, before switching to Autodesk Fusion.

This is frustrating to me and has led to significantly less getting done by me this week with reference to the fablab.

The University has a larger CNC mill than we have in the lab which we will be using for this weeks project. However the Technician was away for the past few days so we are having to wait till next week for them to have time to fit us in.

With that in mind I am linking here my main acheivement of the week in the form of my first successful animation.