Shop-Bot
The assignment for this week was to make something big.
I have made a lot of big (and little!) stuff on the ShopBot over the past 4 or so years, both practical and not. Check out some of my work at my website!
My Fiance has been bugging me for awhile about getting into gardening, especially since we now live in the agricultural capital of America. As such, I decided to make a nice garden for her for this project!
I browsed around the internet for awhile and came across a cool open source project looking to improve urban gardens, called Aker. Taking inspiration from the folks at Aker, I wanted to put together some sort of press-fit backyard garden box.
I started sketching a little in Inkscape and quickly settled on a fairly simply 6'x6" base frame with progressively shorter, 3" tall cross braces for stability and to separate the different plants.
We use VCarve to generate toolpaths in our lab, so I imported a full scale pdf of my drawing and setup some basic hold downs and exterior cut toolpaths. The VCarve file and my toolpaths (set for a 2-flute, 1/4" downcut bit) are available in my file repository
Cutting out the garden went extremely smoothly, I ended up with nice edges and well-fitting slots.
The full garden being cut out
Dogbone detail
We assembled the garden over the weekend, got enough dirt to fill it up as well as some new plants to add to our transplants we were planning on moving into the space. All told the entire thing came together in less than an hour and now we're just waiting for some nice vegetables later in the summer!
Some Mint and Lettuce
Lots of Zucchini and Squash!
