Marginally Clever

Here’s a gallery of photos I took in early August of 2011 while working on my CNC machine. I was making some parts for a Burning Man 2011 art project (part of the temple) and thought you might be interested to learn a little something about CNC machines and why I think they’re so important.

I have a CNC router.  CNC means robot controlled.

This is the table bed.    I take a flat piece of wood and push the wood against the pegs.  Then I use the clamps (there are three in this picture) to hold the wood from the opposite side.  smaller pieces (top and right) fill the gap if the wood is an odd size.  I can remove one board and load the next in a few seconds, if I don’t stop to vacuum.

This is one of 10 benches that I carved with a design given by the artist.  On the right is a detailed view of the design.  The artist gave me a black and white vector image and I converted it in about 5 minutes.  In these cases I told the machine to trace the image outlines.  I could just as easily told the program to carve out all the white parts of the picture.

I did all the top parts one after another, then all the Ts.  I felt it would be easier that way, because I was not making a set of Ts for each board.  I could!  I just don’t have a process set up to do it quickly.

I did not pick this design.

This was unfortunate.  Every bench in the design is different, and so every board is unique.  I only get one shot at these.  Unfortunately here I was using an older clamping system.  The top and bottom boards were well behaved.  The middle two were not clamped tightly enough and they slipped sideways when the drill cut into them.

this is the only one I programmed from scratch.  The artist said it was a “flower of life”.

African wedding?

Normally I get boards that come flat from the factory.  These boards were not all the same thickness, so sometimes parts are hard to see because the cut is not as deep.

Here is a board in the process of being removed from the CNC.  You can see the older clamping system at the top.

Hrm, image rotation isn’t working…  well, this is the machine in progress.  The design on the computer screen is being cut by the router.  The white cylinder on the screen corresponds to the router on the table.  Can you imagine carving that by hand?  Heck no.  That’s why these things are amazing, they let anyone with a bit of mechanical knowledge become an expert woodworker overnight.  50 years from now kids will be learning these things when they’re 8 and 9 the way kids of today learn to to use iPhones.

The bench pieces all laid out.  The 10 designs and >10 edges took about 7 hours to cut because I wanted to get it extra right.  I’m still learning, and I’m looking for opportunities to make money cutting things.  So this is your perfect chance to get something cheap while I build my confidence.  Contact me and let’s make something cool together.