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, 28 August 2013

Lot's of R/C!

With the Zerby Derby kids show well underway at the shop, things are starting to pile up quickly!
 There's new cars to be made, old ones fixed, paint to touch up..............
One of the newer vehicles is this utility truck with an r-c robotic arm. We didn't make the arm, but who-ever did, did a great job. It has a total of 6 degrees of freedom, so it will serve them well on set!
We got the ferry hull de-molded, it was still a bit of work to get the foam off, even with the release agent applied, but the form was great! There were some little spots, but no big deal.
 It pressured washed up pretty easily.
We mixed up a thick batch of epoxy and cabosil and spread it thinly over the hull portions that are above the waterline. This filled all the small pinholes that get left over from casting into styrofoam.
Tomorrow we'll sand it down, put a rubberized texture on it, then this part should be ready for paint.
Due to the size of the ferry, versus the water depth on location, they've decided to puppeteer the ferry around, instead of adding motors and propellers. The loading ramp will also be puppeteer-ed. We were going to install a 12v linear actuator, but the time to move the piston 12 inches, is around 30 seconds, WAAAAY to long for television!


While that was being tackled, I finished the small changes to the pickup truck file, and got it on the Techno. We're cutting the final mold from some pretty dense tooling board. Same stuff as last year.
By the end of the day, the first 2" layer of the truck was rough and finish cut, and the 2nd and 3rd layers got rough cut. I'll run the finishing pass first thing in the A.M.
And while all that was happening, Jody was able to cast up, and base coat another order of 30 beer tap handles. These will get a streaky dark "grain' applied by a rough paint brush, then sprayed with a wood color tinted clear-coat.
Man, were running out of room..........again!
8)
JWO


 




No comments:

Post a Comment