All,
Another solid CNC SIG in the books! Good crowd, good projects, & plenty of “oh, that’s neat” mixed with “hmm, glad we learned not to do that!”
Troy shared some work tied to leather embossing and coaster-making. His wife is a leather maker, and they’re working on various stamps and designs for embossing into leather, along with some acrylic coasters. He also discovered that four-inch letters are, in fact, literally four inches wide, which is not exactly ideal when you’re trying to make a normal-sized coaster! But it looked so small on the CAD…
Bill showed off this nice commemorative acrylic piece and talked a bit about working with acrylic on the CNC. To clarify, the piece doesn’t come with my computer in the background! One useful takeaway was that O-flutes are the way to go for acrylic cuts. When asked why he chose CNC over the laser for cutting acrylic, he said it was out of misdirected enthusiasm. Bill also volunteered to help with updating the Laguna iQ controller, which is much appreciated.
Brian shared his rotary tiki adventures & gave us a nice little comparison between more and less suffering. He started out trying to design the tiki in FreeCAD and found it to be, let’s say, character-building. He then switched to VCarve and found it much, much easier. Sometimes growth looks like learning, and sometimes it looks like abandoning the harder software.
A couple of other useful notes from the meeting: Alex figured out Claude inside Fusion 360 and designed a lamp with a bevel, which is pretty slick. James also gave an update that the fiber laser class is not set up yet, but work is underway on the protective shielding for it.
We also have the Zoom folder here for anyone who wants to revisit the discussion or catch what they missed:
Thanks again to everyone who came out! We’ll see you at our next CNC SIG meeting on June 7th at 12:30pm in the Multipurpose Room at Asmbly!
@atwatsoniii @pconklin2000 @jamesfreeman @bwatt @cjromb @rjnevels @Iammikecohen @SteveW @andrewl @Christopher