Week 07

This is my 7th week at FabAcademy, this week I worked in CNC wood machining. The assignment consisted of:

group assignment do your lab’s safety training test runout, alignment, fixturing, speeds, feeds, materials, and toolpaths for your machine individual assignment make (design+mill+assemble) something big (~meter-scale) extra credit: don’t use fasteners or glue extra credit: include curved surfaces

Group assignment

Regarding the group assignment, we performed an in-depth safety training with my colleagues Pepe and Francisco, including all the necessary steps for runout, alingiment, fixturing, speeds, etc. You can see all the details here: https://fabacademy.org/2025/labs/aindustriosa/week07.html

Individual assignment

Regarding my individual assingment, I decided to use as a base the initial parametric design of my final project idea, and performa an initial test of the pannel fabrication. The pannel consists of a trombe-kind pannel which is an efficient way of saving energy in buildings. First of all, I improved the design of the pannel in a parametric way in Grasshopper. Here you can see the resulting geometry.

Once the geometry was ready and scaled to be of about 1 meter in size, I included a series of operations to get a polyline out of each brep delimiting the volumes of my pieces. Here you can see the operations necessary to convert the volumes in polylines.

This resulted in the following set of pieces delimiting my pannel geometry.

Then I exported the resulting polylines to VCarve as DXF in order to define all the cutting scheme for the CNC. First of all I defined the size of my wooden boards (1200x400 mm and 30 mm in thickness) and then I grouped all the piezes to generate the less possible waste. Here you can see the result after grouping:

In my case many pieces were machined to construct the parametric panel. However the cutting process was similar for all the pieces so in the following I illustrate the machining example of a few of them. Here you can see the machining of these two first pieces:

I bought a tool which was an helicoidal mill of 8x32x80 mm. This tool was deemed as sufficiently robust for cutting my boards (30 mm thick of softwood), which resulted as a correct assumption. Here you can see the tool I bought

Then I defined a new tool for machining in VCarve

Once defined, and previous to calculation I defined the thickness for machining and the bridging for preventing pieces from moving during machining. Here you can see the definition of bridges (Tabs) in VCarve

Here you can see the detail definition of all the tabs

Once defined I just calculated the trajectories, and checked in detail the preview to make sure the cutting scheme was working properly. Then I transferred the gcode to the machine and started cutting, here you can see the result after machining.

Once all the pieces were cut, I sanded a little the pieces and assembled the panel. Here you can see me working in the sanding

And here you can see the final result of my work

Files for download

Here you can download my designed pannel Grasshopperdesign as well as the DXF file latter I used for cutting DXFforcut.dxf)

Also here you can dowload the VCarve files of the machining of my pieces VCarvefiles