I aint got no potatoes!

Sadly, the 3d machining a potato job disappeared :(
It would have been amusing, to say the least, to brag about my awesome cnc skills with raw potatoes, but early creative jobs quite often get shelved until the ideas get re-tooled. OR.........somebody else has more experience cnc machining vegetables, and they went with them! It can happen..........

We finished the mountain of cardboard stencils that the township had ordered. We're still waiting on the material for the last 200 pcs. Man, I thought MDF dust got everywhere, this stuffs insane, even with our dust collector. I did get to enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend, all 3 days of it. In truth, I got a little bored, but the time off was kinda nice.

I decided to finish up the remainder on the shelves, as we have a set piece that goes to camera on Sunday, for 'Million Dollar Neighborhood' that airs on OWN network.

It was pretty much just small details and paint left on the 3 shelves to do, so we worked at finishing them off.

We had a few rolls of rubber tubing left over from the Turbo Town build, so I thought that they would make great hydraulic lines to the cylinders that support the shelves. A few quick coats of copper spray-paint, and they were good to go.

I REALLY, REALLY didn't want to spend the time fabricating little hydraulic hose-fittings, but terminating the lines right into the cylinder would look a little odd. So I rooted through our numerous boxes of stuff, and came across these styrene plastic beads. PERFECT! They even had a hole in them for the mounting screw. All they needed was a quick shot of brass, and then they're done.

The cylinder bottom got it's base coat of Rustoleum hammered copper paint, and we did the brass powder on the gloss black paint trick for the piston. I didn't want a chrome piston as it would be to cold with the other metals we've got going on in the room.

With a little patina, the tubes and fittings worked out really really well! The nice thing about the rubber hose is it's very flexible if it gets accidentally bumped by a chair or broom.

The shelves are rock solid now that they're mounted up to the wall. The underside still needs a little attention with some paint, but other than that they're good to go. These shelves can take upwards of 60 lbs, so theres no danger of them collapsing with anything I'll be putting on them to display!

The space is starting to look pretty good now. It's already come a long way from the bare, cold room it was! We still have another counter to build, and a bookshelf as well, but at least most the stuff is all up and off the floor now.

On a side note, the model-maker I had hired to work on Turbo Town, John Anderson, was in working on a project for his client. It's a trophy for a Halloween contest. Its looking pretty good so far. It's going to have a miniature haunted house sitting on a hillside, supported by some bones. Great concept.

John actually drew up all the parts in Illustrator, then with some toolpathing guidelines by yours truly, he set up all the pocketing and profile cutting tool-paths in Aspire, to run on our Techno cnc.
This is great for me, unpaid training that I will soon be able to take advantage of, on some future jobs!!!!!!!!! Woo Hoo!


We were cutting all the doors and windows from 1/8" styrene, with a 1/16" cutter, at around 92 ipm. I guess I could've pumped up the speed,but I like my little cutter and wanted to keep it for a while!
8)
JO

Shelfing some jobs

The boring-ness of cncing cardboard stencils on our Techno was broken up today when I was able to spare a bit of time to work on the shelves for the new office. They aren't overly fancy, but they'll be cool nonetheless!
They'll match the new desk in terms of style, which will keep the theme going.

The 3 shelves are basically a half octogon. I originally wanted them to be hidden mounted, so just the shelf stood out with no supports, but as things moved forward, I decided I would need an under-support. I think this calls for some sort of hydraulic cylinder! I always have some mixed pipe kicking around the shop, so I employed it. I drew the caps and end mounts up in Aspire, and toolpathed them out to the Techno. In 3 minutes I had all the parts to start the assembly. The cylinders will be made entirely from abs and pvc plastics.

The mounts that hold the cylinders were also cut from 1/2" pvc, with the mounting plates cut from MDF. Everything was screwed and glued so there would be no "shelf malfunctions"!

Because the parts were all drawn in Aspire, and precisely machined on our Techno, the whole assembly snapped together in seconds. In fact, it all fit so well, there was barely any room for gluing.

The excitement quickly waned as I loaded up the next set of stencils to be cut. Soon we'll be done these things, after a while, they all start to look the same :)

We got a call today for an interesting gig. They want a companies logo carved into a potatoe for a print campaign. They asked if we would make it from another material and paint it to look like a potatoe, but it's always better if you can use the real thing.
So stay tuned, you may get to see first hand, Oxenham Design 3D machining a potatoe on our Techno cnc.
If you can't cut it with a Techno, you can't cut it!
8)
JO

The desk is done!

We've been cutting the bike lane stencils for the township, as well as working slowly on the desk. I've also been in the process of transferring all of my files to a new PC. This has been a little slow for me.
I decided to move into 2013 with a new laptop running win7. I know, I know. I was using xp right up until now. Rock solid it was, and as 90% of my software is stuck in the 32 bit lifestyle, there wasn't much point in jumping on 7. However, I did want to take advantage of multithreading, plus the new machine has 3 gb of dedicated video ram! so now was the time. 7 still feels weird to me, but I'll survive!

 We've been doing the final bits and pieces on the desk when there's time here and there.

I guess I'll have to get rid of the leftover Coor's cans. They look a little um......alcoholic-ish!
Now the desk is done, I've started some of the single shelves for the walls. Who knows when they'll be finished, soon I hope.
An associate stopped by and remarked about the desk: "Must be nice to have all this free time to build a big desk" I had to laugh a little!
8)
JO

The desk nearing completion!

I decided to not work this weekend! Although Sunday I kinda wanted to get back to the desk. Unfinished projects eat away at me. Plus the desk is fairly large, and it's taking up an awful lot of space to not be used.

On Monday, I decided that instead of buying more acrylic for the front of the desk, I'd use the sizable chunks of 1/2" that was left over from the Molson bars that we built in the summer. 1/2" is WAY overkill for the desk, but it was here, and It was within an inch of what I needed on the large piece. Of course, it wasn't textured, but Aspire would soon fix that little problem!

I drew up the file in PS for export as a greyscale into Aspire. I just used a spatter brush and saved it out as a 16 bit greyscale.


I used a 1/2" ball nose cutter with an 8% step-over. I set the relief to .125" deep. As this is 1/2" acrylic, I certainly had the thickness. The hopes is that after I spray it with a scary green colour, I can edge light it so it glows green at night through the office window. Not a big deal in the summer, but in the winter it gets dark at 4 pm, so people will still be out and about.

The painted details are now done on the portions that we had assembled. We're kind of building the desk, while working on a few other paying jobs, so It's not going super-fast.

Jody got the textured desk surface painted and glazed, and we got that part installed on Monday

We also got the back supports installed to help solidify the upper counter strength. The textured acrylic will reside between these supports, from the lower counter to the underside of the upper counter.

My desktop pc is screaming for us to finish! As am I. It should be done and finished tomorrow (I hope)
We have to deliver another order of road stencils to the township tomorrow, so that might make finishing the desk a little hard, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed!
8)
JO

A bigger desk soon

Our reception desk is coming along quickly now! I got the actual desk surfaces fabricated and coated with our texture coating.

We tinted the compound with some dark grey acrylic paint we had. This won't be the final colour, but if it get dinged up at all, it will just be dark, and not the white colour it usually is. There's a total of 5 counter sections, so we had to work fairly quickly before the compound set off. I also had to tape off the portion where the upper brackets mount, so the bracket heights would change, causing trouble mounting the upper counter portion.

 The rivet strips got all there base colours on, and so did the upper counter mounts.

We did start to get the pieces all together, so far it's been a giant snap together project. The exception being the crazy uneven floor. But everything was made adjustable to allow for small variances. So far so good.
I'm hoping to pick up the textured green acrylic tomorrow. We're going to edge light the acrylic so it will glow a weird green colour at night.
I'm hoping we have time to build the matching shelves for the wall before the next few projects come in.
Tomorrow we'll get the silver on the counters and then it can dry all weekend!
8)
JO

Finally a place to work!

Now that the Turbo Town job has wrapped up, I wanted to keep the steam going. Maybe not the 18 hour a day steam we had, but some steam. We've got some ad campaign projects that are awaiting approval, so I'm using the short time available to build a new desk. The desk will be more of a work station/ front desk for when people come into the shop. Since we moved into this space in May, I have been working from a VERY small desk in the corner of the office space. I have been using my laptop for the computer design stuff as the current desk isn't big enough for the desktop computer I'm dying to get back to using!

The whole theme for the desk area was pulled from our Institute sign we did with the mechanical fish on it.
So the desk will be heavy brass/ copper and woods. In no way am I trying to fool anyone into thinking we're using the real thing, I think it's far more interesting to make it look like it isn't the real thing. Plus it's in keeping with dimensional signage and film props! This will be a fairly good size desk as it needs to house 2 20" monitors, a computer tower, my laptop and the vinyl cutter. As well as having a place to serve customers that come in for the signage end of things.

The desk was designed in Corel, with no colour renders or 3d models. I know what I'm going for, so the need to model it is a waste for me to do, as I'm not needing any approvals. Just a front, top and side elevation.

I exported the vectors from Corel into Aspire for toolpathing. Once again, Techno cnc produced the panels quickly and accurately. I love that I can do all the complicated stuff in the computer (at my miniature desk) and have accurate pieces I can assemble right away.

Of course, not everything was cut on our Techno, all the rivet strips, which will act as seam covers, were table saw pieces. Jody got to work right away laying out and drilling the 1/2" holes. Were going to use wooden button screw covers as the rivet heads.

With the front facing panels cut, Jody taped off the spots where the rivet strips will end up going. The next step was to parge the panel with acrylic tile adhesive. We've used this a bunch of times for texture. It works great for this sort of thing, and it's fairly inexpensive. Inexpensive materials seem to be far and few these days!

We made a basic woodgraing tools from a chunk of pvc we had from the last job. It worked great. Once the adhesive had hardened up, we got a base coat of yellow ochre on the panels. This will be the first of a few coats we'll use to achieve our simple woodgrain feel we want.

All the rest of the parts we texture sprayed with our scenic mud mixture. These will look killer in a bronze colour. We've also casted up some large bolt heads which will decorate the desk in spots.
8)
JO