CNC milled box

[Ben Werner]

Well in one of my classes at school (computer integrated manufacturing, CIM) we had to make a jewelry box, (on the CNC mill) with a design on top, so heres mine. we had the choice of either doing it out of this weird blue plastic stuff or oak. I did it out of black walnut i brought in my own wood.... ha ha... the tech teacher is really cool and nice (young too, had his 30th this year)

so yup heres my box, took 2 1/2 hours for the mill to cut the design on the top... oh yeah its 3*2*1 1/2 what do ya think??

[Ken Garlock]

Ben, I think it is just great. If the teacher didn't give you an A, he is blind.

I presume that you had to program the CNC machine from scratch?

[Ben Werner]

Originally Posted by Ken Garlock

Ben, I think it is just great. If the teacher didn't give you an A, he is blind.

I presume that you had to program the CNC machine from scratch?

thanks...havent gotten it graded yet... i just took it home to finish and sand over break is all... yep all 5500 lines of code of it (thats just for the design on the top)
<–––– i was doing that for about 20 hours straight ha ha!!

[Ken Garlock]

5500 lines of code

I thought computers were susposed to make life easier.

Merry Christmas

[Ben Werner]

well... the way we do it is we take what we want to mill, and model it in this 3d cad program... then once modeled we just put it in this other program in which we do some special stuff that i just kinda stumble through and then it writes the code.... pretty nifty... yeah the design is actually just i believe A or b or somethin like that in webdings or windings.... one of those funky fonts.... which i just put on the block in the cad program.... what took the longest of all was having the mill actually cut out the design.... uch

follow what i just said??
Ben

[Stuart Ablett]

That is really neat Ben, has your teacher seen the Carvewright?

Cheers!

[Travis Johnson]

Very impressive Ben. I am a CNC Machinist myself and write my own programming as well. It gets pretty involved sometimes, and frustrating, but its fun to watch the machine churn out a project after you typed in all that g-code and M-code programming.

Last week the Secretery wanted to use some plastic we had lying about the shop and make her a game called Aggrevation. By the time we were done, I think everyone had the game and we were digging into new sheets of plastic since the plastic scrap long since ran out. It was fun though.

Good luck to you in your machinist career.

[Vaughn McMillan]

Cool project, Ben. Nice work, and you obviously learned the skills the teacher was trying to teach.

[Greg Cook]

Originally Posted by Ben Werner

so yup heres my box, took 2 1/2 hours for the mill to cut the design on the top... oh yeah its 3*2*1 1/2 what do ya think??

2 and a half hours? Just the top?

Wow, is that normal?

Greg

(no experience with CNC)

[Ben Werner]

i donno about that... i dont have much experience either.... but i think that it is longer than usual... I used a 1/32 bit for an area a little less then 2*3 in, but it did do tons of extraneous stuff for what seemed like no reason... A few of my classmates with much simpler designs only took about 40 min but thats with much les intricacies... so i donno... thats my answer! a big whoppin I DONNO!!!

oh and yes 2 1/2 hours just the top... all the other milling prob took a combined time of 30-40 min