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Week 7: Computer-controlled machining
Assignment: Shopbot
This week's assignment is to design and make something BIG!.Shopbot - This big guy is capable of cutting, carving, drilling and machining a wide range of soft materials like woods, wax etc.
I ride a Royal Enfiled Thunderbird motorcycle. The side stand of my motorcycle broke last week and I've always had trouble parking it at my home ever since. This time around, I have decided to build a docking station for my motorcycle using plywood and shopbot. The below picture gives an idea about what was going through my mind when I say "motorcycle dock".
I used Rhino for designing the dock. I played around with lines, polylines, trim and fillet tools in Rhino to design parts for my final product.
The designed parts were placed in such a way to make best use of the plywood available at Fablab and to ensure minimum wastage of material.
I imported the file in vcarve and set the dimension of the plywood. I went ahead and tried generating toolpath. There were opened paths in the design. So I selected the open paths and joined them.
Once I joined the paths, I also added drill holes and then generated tool path.
I rendered 3D view on vcarve to see how it would look. One portion was not visible on the 3D rendered view, so I closed the open vectors.
I closed vcarve and opened the shopbot software. Then I zeroed X and Y
Zeroed Z using by placing the plate on the plywood surface and clipping the alligator pin on the drill bit.
I selected cut part and the milling started.
Once the milling was done, I removed the taps using chisel and mallet and took out the cut part.
The pressfit parts were joined together using mallet.
Took the dock outside the lab
Parked my motorcycle in the dock.
The press fit motorcycle dock easily docks my motorcycle weighing 185 kgs.
Design file:
MotorcycleDock.3dm