A behind the scenes look at film and television Prop making peppered with everything else creative we do!
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.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Finally the texture
Today saw the texture make it onto the death machine bed and harrow. It looked like serious rain all day, but I did it anyway, and the rain held off. Nice. Jody got a few rust colour washes onto the machine and John came in for a bit to help with the camshaft assembies.
After finishing all the rest of the needle parts I started a test assemble, then I realized I made the 'piston rods' too short. When we were initially shooting ideas around, I made a 4 needle version for the director and producer to see work. After playing around with it for a bit, I thought the needle stroke was a bit long, and assembling it the way we did was a huge pain. So I changed the file to shorten the needle throw and make the piston rods 'snap' in, instead of painstakingly trying to assemble it the old way. Well the 'snapping in' part worked well, but a failure to pay total attention to my own drawings, yielded piston rods .100" shorter and caused them to bind on the camshaft. So I re-drew them, as well as some 'safety' caps to avoid the whole crankshaft from popping out of its mounting. It kind of sucks a little to re-do work that was done once already, but Aspire and Techno cnc made VERY short work of the replacement parts. In fact, it took longer to find the material in the rack then cut all 56 parts out again!
Tomorrow should see the final assembly on the moving needles. It might take a bit to retro-fit the worm drive motor I picked up to drive it all, but it should be fairly easy.
JO
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