Fab Academy 2017 at Fab Lab Barcelona By Trinidad Gomez Machuca
Document the process of design and production to demonstrate correct workflows and identify areas for improvement if needed.
Also you can check this tutorial for a better understanding of Rhino Cam and how it works; but in any case a lot of the information you have to check is at the Wiki of Fab Lab Barcelona.
For this assignment I wanted to fabricate a Hexagon Shelve, but without using glue or nails, so I designed some joins for assemble my shelves; my first idea was to design a universal join that would be able to use everywhere allowing you to assemble all the hexagons that you want without restrictions.
I used Rhinoceros for the design of the shelves, you can see in the image above that I tried different kinds of joins:
1.- The first join I designed, was meant to bend.
2.- The second one, I designed it to bend in both directions, so the join would have 180° of flexibility.
3.- The third design was almost perfect, after I realized that the wood I was going to use would not bend because of the nature of the project, I did one for press fit assemble, but then I realized that this would not look esthetic when the join have two modules, and besides, it would looks like as I have problems with the lower modules because it tends to fell.
4.- So at the end I designed 3 types of joins, that solve the waste of material (with the two modules) and also helps with the gravity.
Mini shelves in the Lasercut
Before you start the Rhino Cam strategy file it is very important to undertand how this works so you can divide everything perfectly in your Rhinoceros File Layers.
DRILL: This is for the holes that you need when you are doing pressfit joints
BOARDS: I did just in case the lines of the boards with a offset of 2 cm
INTERIOR: This means the lines that the drill is going to cut from the inside, this is not going to respect the 90º angules so thats why we are going to drill a 6mm hole in every corner, so the pieces are going to fit perfectly
EXTERIOR: This means the lines that the drill is going to cut from the outside, in this case you can make a 90º perfect angules
SCREWS: This is like a engrave of the specific place where you can put screws
Here you have to select the 6mm drill
Inside profile
Speed
Clearence
Cut lavels
Pocketing
Here you can see all the process that the CNC machine is going to follow, step by step, so you can make sure if the order of the settings of your files are ok. If no problem, you can go and start milling!
After you finished the Rhino Cam file, you open the G code with the Shop Bot interface, the first thing that you have to do is to set the X, Y and Z coordinates in the board.
The X and Y should be in the main corner of the material board after you mounted it to the surface of the machine; the Z position is better to set it in the highest point of the board.
Before to send your files, you have to make sure which is the emergency button, just in case.
First you send the pocketing to mark the position of the screws and then the holes to improve your joins.
Here you can see the bridges that we set in the Rhino Cam, so the pieces maintain attached to the board even they are finished, and then you can sand them very easily, you can also see the square that is in my join, that is why I used the pocketing (like engrave option) so the hole will be very clean at the end.
First I sent a test of one piece by type.
And finally the board, it took 1 hour and 30 minutes, I only used half of my board.
Then I started to sand each piece, which took me about an hour, and then I started to assemble, it was very difficult due to the angle of the hexagonal hole.
I milled extra pieces just in case I broke any piece, and guess what? It happened, I had problems with two important things: one of the angles in one of my joins was wrong, so it was harder to assemble it, and the other was that my offset was not enough, but for sure I'll fix these two things for next time.
First I mounted the isolated hexagons and at the end I assembled all together, after 8 hours of struggle with the hammer, I am happy with the results!
FINAL RESULT
//RHINO
//RHINO CAM
Computer-Controlled Machining Class
Computer-Controlled Machining Assignments and Assessment
This is Fab Lab BCN Wiki Shop Bot here you can find the Feeds and speed of the machines
Here is the Rhino File
Here is the Rhino CAM File
Here is the G Code for Valldaura Shop Bot
| Fab Academy 2017 | Fab Lab Barcelona | Trinidad A. Gomez Machuca |
| IAAC | trinidad.gomez@iaac.net | |