05

COMPUTER-CONTROLLED MACHINING

Idea

During the first weeks of school, my roommate (Ike) was using someone (Kenny) else's chair. Eventually Kenny came to pick up his chair and Ike was left without a chair for his desk:(

I wanted Ike to be able to use his desk so I decided to make him a standing desk! I took measurements to make sure everything would be good for his height and then (sat at my desk) and started designing.

Design Process

After sucess with Fusion 360 for my whistle design in week 03 I decided to keep using it instead of sticking with Solidworks. The reasons being that Fusion 360 is cross platform and overall easier to use. I really enjoy how intuitive it is especially with adding constraints and dimensions. Additionally, it has good interfacing with other Autodesk products (specifically Eagle).

Now that I was more familiar with how Fusion 360 works, designing the model was an easy process. The model is completely parameterized and changing one variable will auto-adjust entire model without any manual adjustments.

Here is what the final design looked like:

Cutting

At first I tried using the Shaper, but ran into issues almost immediately. The tape used to orient the machine does not stick well to OSB. The first idea we had was to tape down the tape using something that sticks better. Not much luck with this approach either because the tape eventually started coming up and the machine got confused. For such a large design, we decided with the current state of matters, the Shaper wouldn't suit my needs.

That's when we decided to switch over to the ShopBot. We used the following parameters and speeds. They are pretty slow, but that's because the wood is not the best quality and the ShopBot is getting old. Pass depth: 0.25 in; Stepover: 40%; Spindle Speed: 12000 r.p.m.; Feed Rate: 2 in/sec; Plunge Rate 1 in/sec.