CNC Models: R&D efforts and removing limiting factors
Some models are easier to translate from laser cutter to CNC than others. Here’ is a prime example for comparison… my Medieval Castle Bank vs Army Transport Truck (the 3D Assembly animations for both are at the bottom of this blog post).
The Medieval Castle Bank was scaled-up to be CNC’able as well added dog bones but otherwise, nothing was changed on the model which I cut yesterday with my ShopBot Desktop. As you can see in the picture below, it isn’t looking half-bad especially when you consider I didn’t need to use one drop of glue to keep it together… everything fits perfectly – just needs a few adjustments along with some glue and clamps to tighten the pieces together next round but the model is pretty much set to go out of the design workshop!
Wooden Medieval Castle Bank – CNC Routed with my ShopBot Desktop assembled without any glue!
Contrast that with the Army Transport truck… I keep running out of clamps so I glue a section then have to let it sit for a day – the major drawback to using this method is that once things are set, you can’t move parts around for the other half of the model!
I’ve done more complex models already like my CNC Straddle Carrier (more on that shortly) but this one is just a pain to keep together with anything but clamp after clamp with lots of glue. This is now the 4th cutting/assembly I’ve made of this model, each time, the design gets a little tighter and easier to go together but some of these models require more clamps while drying on them than pieces of wood needed to put them together in the first place!
Part of the situation is that I design using 6mm thick plywood BUT this round of plywood is 6.3mm, not a big deal right? Well, that .3mm adds up quickly when you have multiple interlocking layers to deal with. I could scale the model up before CNC’ing to account for this but the nice thing about having a tighter model is not needing as many clamps to keep things together (Medieval Castle Bank) but you pay for this with more complex models such as the Army Transport Truck. It’s a give-and-take… the reason I prefer wood is that it’s easy to work with, I wouldn’t imagine trying to assemble a 6mm acrylic model using 6.3mm material.
CNC Army Transport Truck with glue drying and lots of clamps!
Design Discoveries
As I build and make design alterations, after years of making laser models… I’m really learning a lot working on these CNC models regarding things to avoid along with easier methods of assembly. Keep in mind, with lasers, you don’t have tabs, dog-bones and a host of other issues to contend with so it’s a different beast but the lessons are easily applied for both technologies.
Removing Limiting Factors
When ever I run a business, I try to look for the largest limiting factor that’s preventing growth and solve it outright for a good long time. A good example of this is music, I’m not a musician by any standard but I had been using the same tracks for the past 2 years and it was getting dull… so I bought 36GB of new loops and sounds – I previously had only 5GB. Problem Solved for the next few years at least!
My next few issues are related to a serious hardware upgrade, still deciding between a dual socket Dell workstation vs HP workstation but that’s a major bottleneck I eagerly look forward to getting rid of. With all the live video I’ve made, my hard drives are filling-up fast… filming at 1080 30p eats through GBs in no time!
Lower down on my list are lots more woodworking clamps (for laser and CNC related activities), getting a quality 3D printer and maybe another XF100 Canon camera… I’ve only got one camera and want to get into multi-camera work… it would improve the cutting videos tremendously!
CNC Straddle Carrier Update
As mentioned earlier, the CNC Straddle Carrier is a massive model and it’s all done – filming finished a few days back but I’ve since hit my upload bandwidth limit so I won’t be releasing it until early April along with a backlog of several other CNC models. Each live 1080 video that I produce for these things lasts roughly 5 minutes and consumes 5-9GB… a upload limit problem I hope to solve within the next two months but until then, one limit affects another. In contrast, a 720 3D animation consumes 300MB at most!
I’d love to render the 3D assembly animations at a higher quality setting and in stereoscopic 3D and throw-in a bunch of other stuff to make them more interesting to view I have but my computer can’t keep-up as it is! Like I mentioned, limiting factors are everywhere… just got to kill them one at a time!
Medieval Castle Bank: How to Build
Army Transport Truck: 3D Assembly Animation (720HD)