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.

Tuesday 10 March 2015

Ridin' the rails..

Today was a day for paint! Finally, some colour! Not for me though, I get Jody to do it!
I think there are 30 rail-ties in total. All of them get 2 base coats, and 1 coat of glaze. Technically that's the same as 90 pieces. Sorry Jody, I gots other things to do :) Plus I'm the boss..............
Although it didn't actually take too long to do.
We're just doing a 2 colour paint job on these. Most people won't be able to get too close to the final float, on account that most of the time it will be moving! So doing just 2 coats will keep the final paint job pretty contrasty. Just what we want!

So far so good! I love them!

Meanwhile................................
I got all the train parts figured out in Corel, and ready to import into Aspire. I think my favourite part of Aspire, is how well it works with all of our other software. In-fact, I usually end up tweaking my final vectors in Aspire, due to how easy it is to add things like dog-bone fillets etc.
Then off to our Techno cnc for cutting. I have been using our Tools Today cutters quite a lot. These are the Amana up-cut, single flute cutters I spoke about a while back here: Cutters.
I used to use mostly parallel flute cutters on pvc, but the edge quality with the Amana cutters makes it really hard to go back now!

 All of the train parts are just going to be layered flats. It's a fast, strong way to build "seemingly" 3d depth.
Now to put all the crazy pieces together...........
8)
JWO







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