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, 23 December 2015

Painting all the way..............

The painting took a long time on this build. Almost everything was hand painted, as masking for different colors would have been a nightmare!
I added a small OPEN sign that we mounted to the ice-cream sculpture out front of the store. This way, ice cream will be available 24 hours a day, forever! Muhahaha!
The roadway pattern we had printed, and the sidewalks were 1/4" MDF painted. The buildings were the worst thing ever to paint. The light acrylic colors have no opacity at all. This meant a minimum of 3 coats on all the trim. This was Jody's cross to bear for a couple of days! If I ever do anything similar to this, I would laser cut craft foam for the trim, and glue it on. Painting the trim was a colossal waste of time. The other thing that we ended up doing differently, was the awnings. And every building had them. Because I squashed the buildings on the z axis, this left very little separation between the awning stripes. This meant that painting 3 coats on every other stripe was quickly turning into a very amateurish looking building.
I decided to cut vinyl for the stripes instead. But this meant figuring out HOW to draw something to cut. After pondering my dilemma at 2 am, I had an idea!
I was able to select the polygon edgeloop of every other awning stripe, extract it, and export it out actual size for vinyl cutting.
This worked almost flawlessly! Just some very minor tweaking of the cut graphic, on one of the buildings! It's amazing what a clean, crisp, opaque stripe can do for the overall look of the whole project!



All in all, this was a great build! The time allotted was about 1 day less than I would have liked, but we got it done! Everyone loved the build, and it was an overall size of 7 feet by 5 feet. Big enough that they won't have to worry about shooting off the base at the edge of frame!

Ahhhhhh...........I looove my job!

Jody and I wish all of you a VERY happy Holiday Season, and we wish that the New Year brings every one of you happiness, health and wealth!
Until 2016 my friends!

8)
Jamie and Jody



 


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