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.

Thursday 17 November 2011

Rolling along on some brass wheels

Today I started at the shop a bit later than I thought. I had to do a dump run to get rid of all the wood from doing all the windows at home. I started designing the landing gear supports when I arrived at noon.
 This was something I had left until near the end as I couldn't wrap my head around every little geometric condition. On this build, I worked from my 3d computer model, laying all the parts out in Corel and Aspire as 2d vectors. But now that the main fuselage is built, I can physically see and measure the places I need to affix the landing gear frame.
 I was able to pick up 4 bicycle wheels last week for this, and got them sprayed up in a brass colour today. I chose bike wheels because I loved the idea of spoked wheels. And bicycle wheels are fairly dainty, which adds to the look that some parts of this flying machine might be slightly under-engineered. As the director wanted it lower in the front to show the wings, I put on 20" wheels in the front, and 26" wheels on the back.

I removed the rubber for painting, and will fire that back on tomorrow first thing, then stain it all up. I still have to glue up the MDF for the propeller. I should get to that tomorrow as well. Saturday I will machine the propeller, which has been designed in Hexagon, and toolpathed already with Cut3d.
All things considered, we are doing well despite the 5 day window interruption to our schedule!
8)
JO

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