I haven't posted up my build yet, but I have a project with a fixed deadline so I'm posting that in the meantime. I am making a plaque for my wife's boss, who is retiring from the Department of Transportation. Her department is responsible for creating the state map every year. So I am making a wooden representation of the map using the same data they use. I'm only including the major roads, interstates and county lines. Too much info and it would not be useful. (or good to look at). Yesterday I practiced on a piece of insulation foam. This is my first ever project so it was also practice on the work flow of loading the piece, different tool paths and different tools. For the most part it worked perfect, but slow. The vector data I have needs to be cleaned up to I reduce the number of "retract and plunge" moves. Hey, that is what practice is for right? Anyway, it took 9hrs to get this and I aborted the rest of the county lines so I could go to bed before 4am. I also learned the the foam is not a consistent thickness and made the details near the bottom invisible. My next step it to make some samples in wood with a small portion of this to practice the staining and finishing process.
Well done @Nick W you have done an outstanding job on this. For this being your first attempt I can't wait to see where you are in a few more months! If you don't mind me asking what software are you using for this project I would love to give it a go. Thank you for sharing this inspirational project! Mark
I'm playing with Aspire now. It probably could all be done, besides the script, with Sketchup. I spent 7 hours last night cleaning up all the vectors. It shaved 12Mb off the file size so it should run faster next time.
It is very really professional looking, really nice work Nick and thank you for the Aspire tip! BTW Is that you doing a 'table top' in your avatar?
In preparation for my big job up above, I made a few small things as practice. I made some clamps and dust shields for the Y axis. I have never designed something that would need to be folded so it took some trial and error getting the fit right. The shield is made out of 1/8" clear Lexan. Here is the shield design: Here it is flattened out. I also attached some brushes to the ends to clear off debris before it gets to the wheels. And here is the finished* product: *I updated my files based on issues I found in this one. I have not made another one. I think that should cut down on the contamination of the wheels. Now I need to work out a design for a dust shoe.....
