This week's assignment was to make something BIG with the CNC machine.

So I decided to make a desk, nothing fancy really. I almost ran out of time with this assignment, because it is surprisingly difficult. Thinking of a 3d desing to come up with is not on its own difficult. The problem comes, when one needs to flatten it all out, for the CNC to chew on.

Drawing was simple enough, you make a scetch like in any other program, with line tool or if you have more basic shapes like the table top, draw it as a rectangle.

Then from the create menu extrude to give it thickness, in this case 11mm as that is the thickness of the material.

With the move tool you can make sure the ite is nice and flat on the surface, making cutting it easier

I used fusion 360 for making the model as it had the capacity for CAD and it had the CAM as well, so the designs could be prepped for cutting all in one program. The general idea is that the legs interlock together by the slots they have. Then the top of the table is placed on top of them, with the tabs on the top of the legs going into the slots of the top, making the structure more solid. After a nights sleep looking at the design with fresh eyes, I can see I will need to modify the top some. The slots are way too far off for their purpose.

As the table pieces had already been cut I chose to use a band saw to cut make the correcting cuts, for the simple reason of haste. In the time I had the tabletop in shape, I would still have been measuring and planning my programming of the CNC machine. While it is a useful thing it is slow, and something that took me less than half an hour to do with the bandsaw would have taken all day to accomplish properly with the CNC the lab has.

In essence it is my conclusion that with the CNC machine, if you dont get the cut right in the first go, you are in trouble. That is one of the weakness of the subtractive method, material is easy to waste.