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CNC Milled Sample

Steph and I put our heads together and came up with (what we thought was) a simple design to test out the CNC machine. Our first mistake was not accounting for the size of the drill bit in relation to the intricate design we had created. So, it was back to the drawing board to refine and simplify the design.

I drew 'tab's into the design, not realising that Fusion 360 already had that feature built into it. Back to the drawing board again!

With my tabs:

Without tabs:

Tab setup in Fusion 360 shown during 'Simulate':

Then when it came time to finalise the setup in Fusion 360, we soon realised that the 3D setup on it's own was not going to work. Nothing we did was working when we ran the simulation. So, after much trial and error, we ended up with a combination setup using 2D and 3D pocket clearing as well as well as 2D contour setups.

When we discovered that there was a smaller drill bit available, we decided to re-do our setup one more time in order to accommodate the intricate portion of our design, which would require a change of drill bit part way through the cutting process.

The first side to be cut was the 'contour' side.  It worked initially, until it was time to cut around the outside. Sadly, the drill bit got caught up on the edge of some tape and failed miserably.  So close!



The outline of the other side cut just fine, but the pre-set tabs didn't work! Possibly because our model was centred rather than sitting on 'stock bottom', and the tabs were set to stock bottom. Live and learn...


We decided to carefully tape down the edges of the loose piece anyway and try the second pass with the smaller drill bit. Apparently we should have reset the zero before sending it to the machine...


After this, we had had enough...








Until we decided to come in to the lab one more time as a last ditch effort...

I thought I had it set up correctly after a couple more hours of tinkering with the file. When I hit 'Visualize' button on the CNC software, my image showed rotated upside down:


Maybe I should have taken this as a warning sign. But I checked the tool path and everything was aligning perfectly, so decided to move forward anyway. The first thing that happened was that the drill bit went all the way through the piece, got stuck in the waste wood block and seized up:


The end for now...  unless we decide to give it one more go!

 Doing the 2D/3D setup combo combined with a drill bit change was a very steep learning curve, and we learned a TON from this excercise! The next design is going to be a breeze after this. Although we haven't been successful in cutting this yet, I am still optimistic.


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