Monday, November 9, 2009

Sunday, November 8, 2009

more cnc action- cutting with all 3-axis!
















This is my first attempt at cnc milling an object on multiple sides
I had to make a jig that would hold the work piece exactly where I needed it to be after I flipped it.


The last picture shows a finish option we tried on the test piece.  It is milled aluminum that is sandblasted and then polished- I really like the look of it.


After a rough Saturday of learning to operate and write code for the cnc machine things went very smooth today.  Each clip took about 56 minutes to cut- each side is about 25 minutes and the original profile cutout took about 6 minutes.  


Four more to go!

Friday, November 6, 2009

cutting some small parts








matt and I finally got rolling on cutting some parts on the cnc- we cut about (70) small parts out of aluminum this evening working towards a model that should look like this.
really starting to see the potentials of the cnc machine
tomorrow we will try to mill a two sided object hope it goes well!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

connector design




The new connector design - going to try to cnc this thing out of aluminum either tomorrow or this weekend.  Hope it goes well....stay tuned 

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

the cnc machine is online and cutting!




some test runs in r-board






the setup - tweaking some of the bugs in frankie's studio
i think we have most of the glitches worked out
its running really well now!







cutting some 1/8" aluminum with a 1/16" endmill - making some very small parts
can't wait to keep cutting- and so glad the setup went so smoothly

Monday, November 2, 2009

some very cool shop pics














these are some pictures that a friend of mine (mark hawkins) took of another friend's (andy wegner) shop.  andy recently started a stainless steel fabrication business making mostly metal pans, so a lot of shearing, bending and tig welding.  i really liked these pictures- there are some more good shots on andy's blog.  mark is always able to capture some amazing photos- he has a great blog of his work too.

grasshopper: spaceframe





this is created in rhino with the grasshopper plugin

this is a spaceframe I am working on for a project at work.  it is totally parametric- each individual ring, the number of segments of each ring, the depth of the frame, as well as the inside radius of the sphere.  I'm really enjoying exploring the potentials of the grasshopper plugin, I'm finding it to be pretty intuitive and easy to learn once you get the logic that it operates around.  The last image is the grasshopper interface which I guess operates much like a circuit board.