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.

Monday 2 December 2013

The Summer with the Lottery!

There hasn't been much awesome building here lately. We've been doing all computer work and design stuff.
One of the jobs we did during the summer came with a signed NDA, so now that it has finally aired, I thought I would post the build!
I haven't been able to find the commercial online, but I did see it on TV the other week.
This was for Pro-Line sports lottery. The concept was that they wanted giant pinata's. One of them would be smashed open by a guy with a giant pencil, and a football player would fall out. Then they use the pencil to crash through a couple of walls, eventually getting to the counter to buy a proline ticket.
 There was a baseball, soccer ball, basket ball, and 3 footballs. The footballs would be the only ones that actually get busted open, the other ones just kinda hang there. In fact, footballs 2 and 3 were just back-ups, in-case the first one didn't work very well. They didn't want these to be fully dimensional, just kind of extruded flats. The balls were 52" in diameter, and the footballs were 6 feet long. Due to their size, we opted to frame them out with plywood and 1/8" luan for skins. Very lightweight!
I had to solve the issue of how to have the footballs be framed in wood, AND bust open like a paper mache pinata.
I finally decided that we would frame the part that gets smashed, and use it as a mold. So I added a 3" overlap to the frame on the bottom of the football. When we finished the paper mache, it should slide over the upper part of the football by 3" becoming a strong glue joint. To start, we covered the bottom frame in poly-ethylene sheet, to aid in removing the final paper mache.
 The mache part was just a mixture of white glue and water. We also went with a thicker moving paper to bulk the skins up faster.
It wasn't my most favorite part of the build, but the gooey strips went on fairly easy. The hardest part was remembering how many layers we had added. If we didn't have enough, it could fall apart while de-molding, if we added too many, it'll never smash apart. And there was no time to re-mold these pieces. This was another 3-day start to finish job.
I have to organize and label the rest of the pics for posting tomorrow!
8)
JWO




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