CH-47 Chinook Helicopter: Laser Cutting & Assembly

Finished-up a bunch of new CNC laser projects the other day at CNCKing.com, for instance, this CH-47 Chinook Helicopter.

I used 5 mm plywood on this project and everything fit as it should… this is the CNC laser specific version I designed at first, not the second generation version I made with my ShopBot Desktop.

First step once I scalled the drawing to match my material thickness, was booting-up my computer and Trotec Speedy 400 flexx CNC laser cutting through wrapped plywood. Everything went great as usual, I really enjoy working with wood as the settings are so much easier to work with.

Once the CH-47 Chinook Helicopter model was all cut out, the next step is removing the parts from the platform bed. All those smoke stains are going to come off with the paper, leaving a smoke free surface on the parts – saves a lot of sanding time!

This shows that the cut was done properly… nothing is sticking to the sheet which is just how I like it! The challenge with cutting this model was none – once you have the file, just scale and press a button. Takes a bit of testing to get your material settings dead-on but once you do, they don’t change with this awesome Trotec laser! I really like the Ceramicore tube, it’s just so consistent!

After removing all the paper wrapping on the CH-47 Chinook Helicopter, I have a bunch of parts that are waiting to be put together using glue and internal guides. The process is only slightly more complicated than putting together the cars you see in the top left of the image below.

I didn’t use that much glue but squeezing things together makes it all pop-out. I don’t wipe that off generally but I think I’ll start doing it as these parts are all so different and I’m not just getting good at putting enough glue to keep things together but no so much that it comes out everywhere.

The finished CH-47 Chinook Helicopter model performs admirably, the top rotors spin perfectly and the doors (not shown in above image) fit as they should. You can find this model on CNCKing.com under CNC laser and CNC router vehicles.

I took a video of the whole process, start to finish as you can see below.

CH-47 Chinook Helicopter: Laser Cutting & Assembly

You can see my CNC router version of this model with a few slight modifications for easy routing below.

ShopBot’ing a CH-47 Chinook Helicopter: Proof of Concept

and here is a video showing how all the parts come together.