I hope everyone had a great a great Thanksgiving if you were in the US. Hope your post holiday plans go well and good luck if you’re braving the crowds for Black Friday.
Even though my attempt at a base for Dropzone Commander buildings didn’t quite turn out, I saw potential in one of the tests and decided to move forward with it to help fine tune the prototype.
I pulled the stock from the CNC base and the inner milling looks like it was alright to work with. Unfortunately, it was off in another area, the depth of the cut.
I had the stock size wrong and the bit didn’t cut all the way through the stock. Not a big deal but I’ll need to make that correction in the next version as I don’t want to burn a lot of time trimming these out. This is what I get for not using my calipers to correctly size the stock.
After cutting out the center bases and smoothing out the side, I was able to out the building model on the base and see just how off it was.
It turned out that the base was about 1mm too big all around. I marked the new size and used a razor saw to cut it down to size.
After the cuts , I sanded the rough bits out to help keep the sides even and smooth then tested the building to make sure it fit and wasn’t too loose.
It ended up working well so I ran the measurements again with my calipers and fixed the dimensions on my CAD file. While I was in the file, I looked at the G-code, which is the code file that the CNC program uses to direct the milling operation, and saw why the operations where doing some weird things. It turns out I forgot to turn the homing setting off so the machine was try to zero out its position at the start and end of the project. Since I was too lazy to install my homing switch, the machine doesn’t know what to do with those instructions and just runs to ground.
With that cleared up, I reset the CAM operations to hopefully fix some of getting other errors I was seeing and not take so long. Soone I’ll be ready to try this set up again and crank out multiple copies for my set.
Russ Spears
That’s the great thing about prototypes. You can tweak things until you get them to work like you want. The most important thing I’ve learned from this and your great Pitchcar track adapter – I’ve neither the patience nor attention to detail to ever mess with a CNC machine and expect anything useful. But the stuff you make is so cool!!!!
Now I have a hankering (we say that in Alabama) to see a Pitchcar track through a DC building neighborhood. Merging games is always good, right?
Christian
So true. Game Mash-ups are great. Pitchcar City sounds like a pretty great idea. Maybe coming soon in 2018??