Intro
For this week I wanted to test the possibility of joining 3D printed parts with milled wood, this can be intresting for furniture and other large scale products.
Objectives
Previouslly I helped develop a workflow to make some furniture for artist Joyce Billet, where I was tasked with developing the 3D printed parts.
During this project I developed a system for attaching printed parts to milled wood, this week I want to document and test this workflow further. Mybe automate it fullyu to generate all the fabrication files from Blender.
- Blender for 3d modeling
- Custom scripts for exporting the curves that need to be cut on the wood.
- Custom Pything script for generating the robot code for the 3D printed parts
- OpenBuilds workbee
- KUKA KR30 with MDPE
Process
Here is the initial design , for this I am using some pieces of left wood that I want to use to make some type of shelving.
the idea is that using a very complex curve I can mill that and perfectly fit the printed part on the wood, here is an initial test:
![curvefitting](https://fabacademy.org/2024/labs/hopelab/students/luis-pacheco/assets/images/cnc/fittest.gif)
After making sure it fits, not its time to design the different vertical columns that will hold the wood bases.
Taking the dimensions and diving the shelved in 3 layers I started by laying out the 3 wood pieces at a distance.
Then I used a loft to generate the different “columns” this is the design
![RENDER](https://fabacademy.org/2024/labs/hopelab/students/luis-pacheco/assets/images/cnc/render.png)
I printed one of the middle columns so I can test:
Now I milled two wooden boards to check if everythings fits accordingly, to be able to achieve this I first draw an outline of the boards themselves so i can perfectly align each board to the curve:
Afer validating that this worked I printed the resto of the columns and cutted the rest of the boards:
This is the final result:
Conclusion
I like this idea of using 3D printed parts to connect wood, it can help solve some issues that arise from working just with wood.
Files