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, 11 January 2013

Marketing: In miniature!

For the last 2 days I have been prepping drawings, sending them off, tweaking them, sending them off, repeat, repeat, repeat.
I just wanna build!

We are building 2 identical miniature retail stores. These will be used as marketing models/ layout and design tools.

I delivered some small router work this morning, then started building the components that I'm convinced won't change :)
This will be team effort between traditional model making and full automation with our Techno routers. Out of everything we build,  architectural models are my absolute favorite. They force you to work to pretty tight tolerances. The scale on this retail store is 1:24, which means a model inch is .041" in real life.

If you look at the photo above, squint a little, then flex your imagination muscles, you'll clearly see that this stack of styrene panels is the start of 14 commercial refrigerators, that will have double glass doors! These will reside at the back of the store, built into the wall.
One of the most used pieces off stuff in the shop is our 1-2-3 blocks. These do everything from keeping stuff square, to setting up our Techno's.
2 down.....ish. There isn't the time, or the budget to make 100's of wine and beer bottles to populate the shelves. So everyone agreed on using miniature prints of products. We'll apply the prints to the empty spaces between the ribs above. It will look like the "prints" are sitting on shelves. We will be doing this for all the various shelves and gondola's. I really wanted to light the cases, but it becomes quite impractical to light something that will travel as much as these. Most of the components will be "wild" which means they can be placed anywhere they need them to be.
This will be a lot of fun, if the information keeps flowing!
8)
JO






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