Monday, December 5, 2011

a little custom cnc work

we did a little custom cnc work for our friend bill laberge recently. he designed a table with a 2.75" thick edge, cut on a 60 degree angle ... we had a bit that would work, but it was too small to do the work efficiently, so for a moment, we considered alternate methods ... bandsaw it with circle jig? different angle like 45 degrees? in the end, trevor found a larger 60 degree bit and the cuts were faster, very smooth and exact. bill glued up the apron blanks with the grain running parallel to the table top to minimize the effects of seasonal movement. the table has four 22" leaves. (wow...big one), trevor cut and beveled the leaves to length and bill cut the leaf apron edges on his tablesaw ... i'll try to wrangle a finished photo when it's finished ... i saw it mostly assembled last week and it looked pretty cool. cilck the photos to enlarge them ...
stepping cuts had to be made ahead of time to allow room for the collett that holds the bit
in the middle is the top mated with the apron piece .. very smooth and precise ...

4 comments:

Jason Herrick said...

Very cool! I would love to see it all complete. It's funny to see the dog bone routed into the spill board too. :) Just out of curiosity, what is the CAD/CAM software your using with your Multicam? As always, I'm so impressed.

Dorset Custom Furniture said...

hi jason ... for fancy drawing, we use autosketch (the cheap, limited, autodesk version of autocad), we save the drawings and import them as .dxf files into enroute 3,our toolpathing program. trevor also draws a lot of the parts he cuts directly in enroute but i find it a less user friendly cad program. plus we only have one $1750. key so we would be fighting over the laptop that runs enroute ... depends what you're used to i guess. enroute will import any .dxf file and export ,dxf files from toolpathing applications.
hope that helps ... call me if you want to talk more about it ... dan

Jason Herrick said...

Thanks Dan! I may take you up on that call. I am getting away from Sketchup in preparation of CNC machining in my near future. The folks at Autodesk don't give their products away but sure are great. The CAM software is still up in the air for me, but I will look at Enroute much closer now that I know it works for you. THANK YOU for the info. :)

Peterbilt Trucks for Sale said...

Cool! I wonder how this will look after you completed it. Looking for more here, thanks!