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CNC WITH SHOPBOT

DESIGN

I knew that the hardest part this week would be operating the shop bot as I'm going to be honest, I knew I would not remember much from Matthew's demo on Tuesday when the time came for me to cut my own project.

With this in mind, I wanted to design something simple assembly wise, with aesthetics in mind more than functionality. My first thought went to a sign of sorts, or at least something that could decorate a wall. I also wanted to make use of the shopbot's ability to cut complicated edges and shapes, so i ended up going with a cloud because of the natural curves. I also really like lightning and electricity so I thought I'd make it a storm cloud, and have it consist of multiple layers to make a rough 3d form.

FUSION

I made a sketch in fusion with ease, intending to make the sign about 4 boards of osb thick. I settled to have a flat bottom on each cloud piece to make it clear which way it is meant to go.

Next I moved to the manufacturing tab, and followed David's Fusion CAM tutorial. I chose to do the CAM in fusion because I wanted to get the most work I could done at home. This went okay for the most part, except that I realized I had to increase the thickness of the pieces from 1/2" to 3/4" based on the stock we have, and I lost the chamfer I was intending to do on the smallest cloud piece in the process. This was okay though because I wasn't expecting fantastic results for it using osb anyways.

ASSEMBLY

I obviously got someone with experience to help me with the shopbot (shoutout to Jonathan). I did run into an issue with my first cut attempt, as the third piece came loose when the middle slit was being cut and caused a weird noise which made me slam down that red button. The tabs hadn't worked, even though I increased them from the default thickness value and make and excessive amount of them. This wasn't a huge deal though, as all the parts from this cut were useable. We just made a new cut with the remaining pieces and increased the tab thickness even more, and this cut went fine.

Once my pieces were cut out, having lost the functionality of the piece that was meant to wedge them together and not wanting to waste the wood and time to recut entirely, I decided to glue the pieces together with wood glue.

I also wanted to add raindrops to make it more visually interesting and give some color. I lasercut some teardrop shapes on blue acrylic and drilled holes along the bottom of the cloud, and attached the raindrops with string.

RESULT