OSB nightmare. Material matters.
Planning
Designing
I thought of making a baby fense to keep my son away from kitchen. I searched before for off-the-shelf fenses but they did not fit the setting of my room.
I also wanted the fense not to be a boundary but rather to be a connection. I designed it as a playful toy with a function of a fense referring to such toys as below.
Rough sketch on a piece of paper.
It was my first time to design something on a CAD software. I chose AutoCAD this time. Here is a screenshot from the work in progress.
Groceries
CNC Panel Joinery Notebook: I wanted to try "captive nut" joint described there. However, I did not have enogh time to understand about US Standards of nuts and bolts. I could not determine actual design to achieve that functionality.
Preparation for cutting
I put together notes from West Section Shopbot tutorials here.
When I loaded the .dxf file, I noticed that I have desgined by meters. If we set the unit as inches for canvas, the numbers are recognized as inches. I ended up with getting a huge fense for giants. There were three ways to recover from the situation.
- Go back to AutoCAD and conert from meters to inches
- Shrink the entire desgin on VCarve
- Change the canvas setting to meters on VCarve and save the path as Shopbot inches file (since shopbot is a inch machine).
I added fillets for each position where I need. Provided OSB material was with thickness of 0.46-0.47 inches. I set profiling depth as 0.48 inches but later figured out it was not enough.
Zeroing Z axis.
Elapsed time indicator.
Cutting (1:00)
Loaded OSB on the platform.
Zoom in the joint part. OSB was not cut through for the setting .48 inch unfortunately.
Assembling
The joints seemed fine but it was hard to pull out all the parts from the board. I also realized the the surface is not so safe for babies.
I regard this as a prototyping wrok and will make with plywood for a "production" version.