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 8 July 2013

Nothing Like Molson's on the Weekend!

We spent the weekend at the shop again. This time it was a small job for Molson Canadian.
Keeping in this month's theme of beer games, this build was right on the money!

They wanted a "Ring Toss" game. I was sent a Sketchup 3d model, but I ended up redrawing it, with a little more precise dimensions.
With having access to the Molson FTP site, I was able to download the logo vectors. I laid out all the circles that represented the beer bottle placement, and trimmed them out of the center of their logo.
Once I had the final shape, I split it into sections for the most amount of material sheet yield.
Using Aspire's nesting capabilities, I was able to nest the backer board, and 14 layers of the logo onto 4, 3/4" sheets of maple plywood.
It took awhile, but I got all the pieces assembled and glued into the extruded logo shape. As you can imagine, it took even longer to finish sand the layers!
We went with a water-based stain for this, for the ease of clean-up. This required the heavy use of a pre-stain conditioner. However I still stand behind my belief that water-based products basically mean "crappy performance". That's just me though!
With the humidity over the weekend, it took forever to dry!
2 coats of clearcoat on Sunday, and it was done. They didn't actually send us enough beer bottles to fill it, but our client said he would have no trouble getting more empties!

Now, back to the hiker game final additions!!
8)
JWO



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