Dec
22
A clock from the machine!
By amackie
I’ve always wanted to take an idea from a digital drawing to production on a computerized cutting machine, and last Thursday night I had my chance with Karl’s awesometastic CNC router.
For those who haven’t seen one, a CNC machine basically reads a series of shapes drawn on a computer, and cuts them out of wood, metal, plastic, etc. I’ve been thinking about a housing for a clock project I’m working on (details are to come), and discussed how the CNC could make it happen.
Karl recommended that I try doodling it in Inkscape, then using the Gcodetools plug-in to generate output that his machine could parse and draw with.
And then, we printed. Did it work? Video is worth a thousand blurry words!
I think so.
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Now **that’s** rapid prototyping!
Well done.
DW
Very cool! I’m curious though.. couldn’t the software that translates the inkscape file into a tool path automatically account for tool width? (under the assumption it’s a complete cut, and there is some way to indicate it in inkscape [such as the colour black will be cut out]. This obviously would have limitations for surface detailing)
“couldn’t the software that translates the inkscape file into a tool path automatically account for tool width? (under the assumption it’s a complete cut, and there is some way to indicate it in inkscape [such as the colour black will be cut out]. This obviously would have limitations for surface detailing)”
I think you can account for it, I just didn’t use a tool at all the first time around. I believe GCodeTools used a default tool of width 0. The screenshot above shows a tool that I manually added after the cut, from Karl’s measurements of the routing bit used.