"Small investment, Big return!"

Tonight's post is a short but awesome one!

Techno cnc routers is having a 2012 Holiday Video Contest. YAAAY!

This is the first one of this kind they're doing. Hopefully it wont be the last.

Heres the quote from their website:

Show us your Techno CNC Router in action!  

We want to see what our customers are doing with their routers.

Enter the "Small Investment Big Return" Video Contest by submitting

a short video and you have the chance to win a big return of

$1500.00 in your pocket for the holiday season.

 

 

The winners will receive bragging rights and a privileged placement on their Home Page for one month. First place winner will receive $1500.00, second place winner will  receive $500.00, and third place winner will receive $250.00.

 

This is pretty huge of them to put a contest like this on. I'm pretty pumped to see what other people are making on their Techno. I haven't found any other cnc company promoting their customers in this capacity.

This kind of stuff makes me very proud to promote a company that not only makes great products, but continues to be interested long after the sale!

 

Great work Techno!

8)

JO

  

 

Monopoly Game over 2

The green monopoly house was next up. We modified it slightly from the files to make it a bit faster to build. The house is actually going to be a lampshade in one shot.

I drew all the vectors up in Aspire, and laid them out for cutting on our Techno cnc.

I cut these all on our big machine, as the LC 3024 was a little too small to get them all in one file.
I cut the parts with a 1/8" end mill at about 120 inches per min. 6 minutes until I had a stack of acrylic, ready to work on!

One of the tools here at Oxenham Design that we don't use all the time, but when we need it, becomes the 3rd most valuable tool I own. It's basically a mitering jig. It has a Makita laminate trimmer mounted underneath, and the table pivots from 0 to 85 degrees. On top of that, the assembly moves in and out via a rotating knob, to allow for perfect miters on small pieces. We use this whenever we're building miniatures, and I'd be lost without it.

 With all of the pieces run through the mitering jig, it was down to assembly!

They all went together perfectly! And with routered miter joins, all the corners were flawless.

I love the way it came out. Once it was cleaned off from all the electro-static dust that seemed to appear out of nowhere that is. The whole thing mounts to the light base through a whole in the chimney, and the chimney hides the nut.

Once the rest of the pieces were finished, there was nothing to do but clean-up!
The art director agreed to take a trip to the shop, and pickup the pieces, saving us a very early delivery to location in the morning! Thanks MB!

This was a great build! The timeline was perfect, 10 hours a day, nothing crazy like the summer.

I hope I get the dog back, that would be awesome!
8)
JO

Monopoly Game Over!

We spent the whole weekend at the shop, getting the rest of the monopoly props built. I really like building stuff, and when I'm at the shop, I know exactly what I need to be doing. This makes being at the shop a total joy! I don't ever get bored at the shop.





 The machining of the rest of the dog went very smoothly. And the fact that our Techno cnc was turning out finished pieces quite rapidly, meant there was no waiting around!

 It didn't take very long to assemble all the pieces either. I ended up drilling two 5/16" holes under the ears and down into the neck and body. I epoxied 2 dowels into the holes, to add strength to the head.
I ended up cutting all the parts with a 1/4" ballnose cutter, and a 9% stepover. This left some stepping on the near-vertical sections of the geometry, but with HDU it was easily cleaned off. It can be faster most times to just sand and file the seams, versus running a new toolpath at a 90 degree angle to the first pass. If the part had to adhere to the geometry specs tightly, I would toolpath the near vertical edges with a super tight stepover, limited to just those areas. But not today my friends, today the sandpaper and file wins the race!

We primed the dog in 2 stages. The first stage was done with a water-based, single stage epoxy paint. After the HDU was 'sealed', we moved onto using the Rustoleum sandable primer. This primer comes in black, is super easy to sand, and doesn't clog the paper. Plus it handles a mix of different solvent based topcoats without wrinkling or cracking. Nice stuff.

We were asked on Friday if we had time to paint a chest to look like the 'community chest' on the monopoly cards. We agreed, and the chest was delivered around 9 pm Friday night.

Jody scuffed the whole thing down so the paint had a fighting chance of sticking. The poopy part was all the hardware was riveted on, and we couldn't get to the backs of the rivets to drill them out.

This meant spraying all the hardware white, then masking it all off for the blue.

We used a latex acrylic for the blue. Fast dry, opaque, and water clean-up. Plus, the chest has to last 1 day, so durability isn't a factor.

It came out pretty sweet. It's only being shot from the front, so we didn't have to be meticulous with the back side.

The hat and the iron got primed with the black Rustoleum primer, the same as the dog. By the time these where ready for paint, they were so smooth and beautiful, I almost wanted to keep them black!

8)
JO