Week 7

Mar 08: computer-controlled machining

List of task this week

- Group assignment - do your lab's safety training test runout, alignment, fixturing, speeds, feeds, materials, and toolpaths for your machine
- Make (design+mill+assemble) something big (~meter-scale) that could not be made subtractively

Group assignment

To see the group assignment go here.

My thoughts on this week’s group assignment, do your lab's safety training test runout, alignment, fixturing, speeds, feeds, materials, and toolpaths for your machine: The safety training I have seen and listened to so many times that that didn’t do all that much for me, but the test pieces did a lot, I have used the Shop bot quite a few times but it was good to do all the tests and really think about how things fit best together and how best to mill things.

Make something big (~meter-scale) that could not be made subtractively

My idea was to make a big Fab Lab logo but with more surface area with rgb textile on the back to minimize the eco in the classroom part of the Fab Lab. I put the Fab Lab logo into Inkscape and worked with circles, I made one that covered the whole logo and made it a bit see through and made a lot of different sized circles on the logo to make into holes, to see better how it would look like I made it in the rgb colors. I made holders with holes in it to hang it up, and once I was happy with it, I put everything into cutting lines which are red and 0.02mm thick and saved as pdf.

I opened Vcarve. and set the size of the material which for this project was 1200x1200mm and 8.8mm thick and put the Z on top of the material. I used the Create fillets tool and put both a dog ear and t-bone fillet inside the holders. I made two different toolpaths, the first one was down cut, the one I used was a 6mm end mill bit, I made it just one pass and go down 2mm. The other one was up cut and it was also a 6mm end mill bit, and had it go 3 passes and go a little deeper than just the material to make sure it goes through beautifully. I used the Add taps to toolpath tool and added 2 taps on everything to keep everything in place. Previewed to make sure everything was good and saved both the toolpaths.

I milled out the down cut, changed the bit, zeroed the z- axes and milled the up cut, it took about 1.5 hours to mill. After it finished I took a chisel and a rubber hammer and broke all the taps and took the circles out.

After that I had to get rid of the leftovers of the tabs so I got out our dremel. When the logo was ready I took fleece material in rgb and cut out on the back and stabled it on with a stable gun.

I put on the holders and will add a photo when I have hung it up.

Here it is hung up, I hung it up for the pictures and took it down again, we will be puting up hooks for this but can't get to it until later on.

Other projects in the Shop bot that I have made

When I started working at Fab Lab Reykjavík there was little of a system in the laser room, so I designed in Fusion360 a system that would go under the table to sort material for the laser cutters.

We also one needed little, tall tables however that one I did design in Inkscape.

Links

Download down cut