Week 5 Skill Builder: CNC Joinery

This week I tested out a joint design that I am hoping to use to connect the base to arm and arm to head of a lamp I am designing for light and interactivity. I decided to go with a dogbone design created to hide as much of the joint as possible. The vertical piece of wood slides into the base from the bottom using the weight of the base to hold everything in place. Miraculously, a tolerance of .01 ended up resulting in a very satisfying tension fit where the base needs to be pushed down with force onto the vertical piece but cant be pulled apart without lots of back and forth wiggling. The end result includes just a little bit of empty space at the side of the joint. In the next version, I want the outside edge of lamp arm to be flush with the base perimeter. I am planning on insetting the bottom of the arm and using the routing table to chamfer the edges of the arm so that it can slide in without having any empty space visible in the joint. Additionally, the joint is much larger than necessary. I designed this with a .25 inch bit but it can be reduced to a .125 inch bit with the dogbones smaller and closer together.

Week 2 Skill Builder: Milling Acrylic

This week during class I milled a pice of acrylic into an oval disc with a star shaped pocket. Instructions at bottom of post. After I was comfortable with the mill, I created a base / enclosure for an led candle that I built for light and interactivity.

Instructions for star oval acrylic:

Step 1: File setup in Illustrator. Below is a picture of the combined pocket and profile. I saved twice, each one with just one of the paths so that the Bantam software separated the vectors into two jobs.

Step 2-6: Import into Bantam, measure acrylic height, set up material size and placement in software, scale and place illustrator image inside of material bounds in software, clean OtherMill bed, put double sided tape on acrylic and press onto bed firmly.

Step 7-11 : Zero x and y axis using switches, move bit over empty bed, zero z axis. Next, I engraved the pocket for the star, after that I cut out the profile of the oval. I accidentally set the milling tools to 1/8th Flat End Mill instead of 1/8th so it went too fast but it turned out not to be an issue with the final piece.

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