Making is as much about exploring as it is about building. Exploring new ways of problem-solving, understanding how things are made, how machine components fit together. And this week, for me, about exploring new tools.
There are a lot of makers who really like SketchUp’s approach to 3D modeling. Personally, I think it’s a great way to get kids hooked on the idea of designing physical shapes that they may or may not fabricate with the laser cutter or 3D printer. While it may take a bit to get the hang of scale and accuracy, once you have these habits, your designs are repeatable with a variety of CNC tools and many different materials.
By looking about on Thingiverse and in the MAKE Flickr pool, you can see that Sketchup is a fairly popular tool for many of us who like to bring our ideas onto this side of the computer screen. The Make Ideas Real with SketchUp project is looking for examples of things that have been designed with SketchUp and brought into the world. The folks at SketchUp are gathering stories with the Make Ideas Real project about how people are using the program to design the things they make.
Another cool technique for your bag of CNC panel-cutting tricks. The booklets and photos shown here are from the Dutch firm Snijlab lasersnijden (which, obviously, translates as “Snijlab Laser Ninjas”). The method is kind of like kerf-bending, but the cuts go all the way through the substrate.
I have built a couple of laser-cut and CNC-routed kits, recently, that use this clever arrangement of tabs, slots, and a couple bits of cheap hardware to securely butt one panel against another at a right angle. One panel has a pair of rectangular ports with a round hole in between, and the other has a matching pair of tabs with a smaller T-shaped slot between. In use, the ports receive the tabs and a screw passes through the round hole and along the upright of the T to mate with a square nut captured in the arms of the T. There are many possible variations and the technique has lots to recommend it from a manufacturer’s standpoint.
Ben Krasnow – of DIY electron microscope fame, among other impressive projects – has posted some useful notes on an unusual cutting process. Normally, of course, the recommended practice for cutting plate glass is scoring and breaking, but it can be cut using a more-or-less conventional milling setup provided you get the details right…
OK, almost entirely: The actual cutting is done by a metal drill bit. Everything else, however, is Lego system elements. It looks like the machine uses a “raster” type subtractive process, covering the surface of the block in a close-packed grid of holes, each of which is drilled to an appropriate depth to form the final surface contours.
This Nissin 3D bender is kind of like a PlayDoh Fun Factory, except it squirts out 1.25″ steel pipe instead of soft non-toxic-but-funny-tasting dough. Looks like much of the magic is in the bending-die head.
