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Computer Controlled Cutting



background - l'boucshelf

this weeks assignment: build a big thing

design

using Ani Liu's awesome Corgi project as initial inspiration, i settled on building something useful that i could use in the office. quick personal aside - when i go back home to visit family in the french alps, i always look forward to playing with l'vache (the cow) and l'bouc (the goat) that graze during the summer months. i couldn't find a good 3D model for a cow, but i found a pretty good goat. thus, l'boucshelf was born (heh).

schematic
fig 1. so lovely and useful
board

i more or less followed Ani's post (see above) to the T. i found a 3D model of a goat and got to work dissecting it in Rhino. removing the profile sheets were tricky, but i hacked my way through forming the legs by tracing flat png files i found browsing the interwebs. slots were made using the command called Boolean Split on both X and Y axes contours.

modeling

goat in rhino
fig 3. a lot of deleting happened here. i used the contour command to take slices out of the model taht i wanted to use. since the quality of this 3D model was pretty poor
goat in rhino
fig 4. i used this png to get a general shap for the body piece (after shaving off the horns and legs...). this was done in Illustrator
goat in rhino
fig 5. some of the slots i created using the Boolean command in Rhino
goat in rhino
fig 6. the complete layout of my pieces!


cutting



with John's (amazing) support, i was able to resize the slots to the appropriate size (it came out of Rhino at 0.145", whereas it should've been the thickness of the board, which was ~0.47". in Rhino, I had specified the slots to be 0.44"). regardless, John also walked me through uploading the .dxf file to the ShopBot3 and creating my toolpath trace, setting my cut depth and began printing! and then the snags began...

head mess up exhibit 1 another heady mess
fig 7. note toe self: always set up tabs! so that way your head doesn't slide around and get buzzed...


tada!

i ended up cutting out a new head, and l'boucshelf was born...

l'bouchshelf

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