COMPUTER-CONTROLLED MACHINING

For this assigment, I wanted to design something that would be useful for me on a personal level since I'm secretly (Not anymore! :D) a crazy cat lady and one of my cats will be a mom in a couple of weeks and she's a outdoor cat. Therefore, I decided to build her a place where she can stay with her baby kittens in my back yard and since the new season of GOT is coming up :D, I built my Lucy a cat castle !

Designing on Onshape

The 3D desiging process was pretty easy and straight forward. However, according to our machine instructor, there are some notes or remarks I had to make sure of.
The bit of the ShopBot will affect the way the edges look especially sharp and 90deg edges. Thus, our instructor showed us how to do the T-bone design on sharp edges so that the machine cuts it more precisely and the slots would fit as planned.

Here's the final design !

The Fabrication Process

To fabricate my castle, I used the ShopBot machine with one sheet of MDF 12mm wood.

1- I fixed the sheet on the machine using screws on the edges. Then, I used the machine's software to prepare my files using the proper settings which were in the machine's tutorial provided by our lab.

2- Once I was done preparing my file, I started setting up the machine and homing it by following the machine guide available at our lab.

I will update the page with a picture of the castle with its queen in it soon :D