When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIRE software, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.

Monday 9 May 2011

What a week




Well, the new website is up and running! This was a whole week of 5pm to 3am computer work. There was a LOT of 2 steps forward and 3 steps back. Then the monumental task of finding all my passwords and login info for the hosting company. But it's done. Now we will be able to update this far more regularly.

 But back to the work that pays! John was in today assembling all the small cam levers that will form the 4 camshafts. Although the picture looks like a Tim Horton's ad! Each camshaft will have 14 tattoo needles. It will look pretty sweet with all the needles pumping up and down as well as the tube that snakes between the rows spraying water to wash all the blood away. Keep in mind, our tattoo needles will be made from 1/8" brass tubing, and will look extremely unsanitary, so there will be a lot of blood.

We were also able to get the machine texture coated, this will help to make it look really rough when we do the rust paintwork.
 The front of the machine has that mechanical iris I spoke about earlier. The iris will open with a lever, and that's where the paper gets fed into for the machine to decide what the fatal tattoo will be. That file was supplied by gbanet from the Vectric forum.  We got that cut from 1/4" sintra and all painted up. It looks great! Behind the iris, we hacked a paper shredder that will "suck in" the paper. We'll put in a catch basket so the shredded paper doesn't rain down on the actor.
  We also got asked to fabricate the marker buoy with a weathered sign that states "Now Leaving Canadian Waters."
I got the "tube" frame all fabricated for that, and hopefully will finish the building tomorrow.

JO
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