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.

Friday, 15 June 2012

Soon they will be done!

We finished the pile of message board frames for one of the breweries here in Canada. These were just simple engraving.
I got started on the next set of beer related projects last night. These are 3D machined Tap Handles for Sleeping Giant Brewing Company. We're just machining them from birch, they'll get finished by someone else. In this case, just the way I like it. I had modeled these some time ago in Aspire. The vectors came from the customer, so I just used them to create the various components. The first run is only around 40 pcs, but the time does add up. Even though we're cutting them on our steroid popping Techno cnc, they still take time!
I could only squeeze 12 on each slab of 1" birch, but that's OK.

I thought I'd post a few vids of it cutting:







 

One thing I love about our Techno cnc, besides it's speed, is it's positional accuracy. The text portion of the beer tap handle was pretty small. The lower case characters are around 1/8" high, so they're pretty tiny. I used a 40 degree Dremmel bit for this to v-carve them. After it had run all 12, I lightly sanded the tops and ran the same file again to clean out the furries. I NEVER would have done this on our older stepper based machine. The chance of a single missed step could have rendered 2 hours of machining wasted. Not our Techno cnc though. Not a single ounce of offset anywhere. Now that's a machine to bank on
And we do, daily!
8)
JO

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