Wood footbridge part two!

We picked up the lumber from home depot and ended up getting some redwood in place of treated as it would look better and last longer. For the arced boards we used 2"x12"x96" boards and traced the curve with PVC screwed into the two corners and top middle. Cutting it was pretty difficult and tried a few different tools before settling upon the jigsaw to do all the cutting, even at that each board took about 30 minutes to cut. In the original design, I had five supporting arced boards total but decided upon only doing three, it would still be very structurally sound and would require much less work. 

The assembly of it was quite easy, and I'm thrilled I spent extra time on the design to figure out how the thing would fit and screw together. I did several dry fittings of the bridge before screwing everything together, and it paid off, it turns out the arced boards where each slightly different and the top planks wouldn't sit flat on their surface. We were able to solve this issue by taking an electric hand planer to the three boards clamped together.

I also miscalculated the width of the 2"x12"'s width and ended up having to trim some of the inner cross-boards to fit correctly. 

After that, we cut the top planks for the bridge. We found that home depot had some more beautiful 12" boards, so we got those and just ripped them down the middle to get 6" planks. We pre-drilled the holes on the top boards to ensure they all had the same screw spacing, and with the help of my brother, we put it all together. I also dug out spots on either side of the creek for the two ends of the bridge to fit into the ground and top face of the bridge to meet up with the stepping stones. 

We built it outside of its final resting spot so it could be removed later for staining. We would order the chain online as the local stores didn't have what we were looking for, as well as caps for the 4x4's. Overall I am thrilled with how it turned out and was an exciting challenge!

Since the Coronavirus left many people at home with not a lot to do, many people have been doing home improvement projects; and so some friends down south are doing the same. 

One of the things they wanted to add to their property was a small wooden footbridge over a small dry creekbed; and asked if I would be willing to design something up in Fusion360. The creek was approximately 6ft across, and they wanted the bridge to span a bit longer to have it fit better with the surrounding. The width of the footbridge was to be 3ft wide with an arced.

@josiah and I spent a bit of time looking online at designs to figure out exactly what would look best and how to build it. After coming up with a couple of different designs, we settled upon one that would have four 4"x4" posts in the corners of the bridge with long structural beams that go across the creek. 

The main issue we ran into pretty quickly was how do we get a curve on the supporting boards. I did a quick google search to find out what other people have done and found an informational video tutorial. They used conduit (plastic tubing) and attached the two bottom corners of it to a 2"x12"x96" piece of wood, then the middle was screwed into the center top of the board; you would then trace the curve and cut it with a circular or jigsaw. To ensure you had consistent curves, you would then take that board and trace it onto others. 

For the top planks, we found some 1"x6"x48" lumber at home depot that would work great for this. Since the bridge has an arc in it I figured we would space the boards out by 1/8" to make it look as if the gaps were planned and not since we don't have the tools to get chamfered edges.

Since neither of us had all that much experience, we wanted to keep the design relatively simple and straightforward, so we spent extra time figuring out exactly how it would all fit together. Which is why we are going to use a chain as the guardrail, it wouldn't provide any actual support if you were to fall but more for aesthetics.

I completely forgot that the wood we would be using isn't its actual size like 2"x4" boards are actually 1.5"x3.5", so I spent another couple hours making changes to the design to accommodate for that so we wouldn't run into issues when building it. 

I then took the design into the drawing section of Fusion360 and deconstructed it and took the board shapes and figured out the quantity we would need of each one as well as how much stock we should buy for the project. I'll be going down this weekend to work on it and will post an update after. 

Last week I posted about making a bishop chess piece for someone on Instagram. I wasn't able to finish it due to the finishing passes not aligning correctly, so I would have to redo them. I have finally gotten around to doing it again, this time, the knight chess piece for verity. 

The wood here is walnut, which I picked up from eBay. The whole machining process was straightforward and only took about 30 minutes to make all the tool paths for it. I used four 3D adaptive clearing operations with a 1/8" four flute square endmill each from a different side of the block and a total of 54 minutes of machine time. 

Next up was the morphed spiral finishing toolpath. I used a 1/8" four flute ball endmill with a 0.008" stepover on each of the four sides of the stock. After doing that I needed to cut the chess piece off the block, and I did this with the same 1/8" ball bit with adaptive clearing and limited it to the very bottom of the knight; this would allow me to simultaneously cut off the part from the base of the stock and finish it. 

Halfway through, I realized there was a gap under the horse's head in the 3D model, and it didn't pick up that detail with the ball endmill. To fix this, I took a 1/16" ball tool to remove the material under the head; unfortunately, it was smaller than the tip was so I took the 1/32" vee bit ball-tipped endmill and did the operation again, this time it worked. The total machine time was 103 minutes, with only minor changes from the original setup. I think I can cut this time down by 20+ minutes with some cleaning up of the code, but overall, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. 

I filmed the entire process and will edit and upload it to youtube sometime next week.

My parents wanted to get back into gardening again and wanted me to make a raised garden bed help with growing and to keep good soil from getting mixed in with the dead dirt of where we live. 

I looked around online for what other people did first and then came up with the design. I would have the legs and cross beams be out of 4"x4"s and the structural bit between those out of 2"x4"s. I wanted the bottom base of the bed to be sloped into the center to drain water. I would then place chicken wire along the walls and floor of the garden to give it more integrity, so the dirt isn't putting so much pressure on the corners of the wood. I then would use a black plastic sheet and cover the chicken wire to prevent the wood from molding and having to be replaced as soon. 

Once I was pleased with the design, I took it into the drawing section of Fusion360 and made some plans I could follow while building it. It's especially helpful to put it in a drawing format because it saves so much time from trying to problem solve on the go and potentially make more mistake cuts. I also had an angled board, which I've never done in a project before, so I was able to find the angle very quickly at a glance at my project.

I did have to make some modifications to the garden box on the fly to save on time and money, so the outcome was somewhat different than the design. I was also able to take advantage of using new wall siding we had to lie around for the walls of the bed. 

After my last post, I started working on machining the pendant in aluminum.

The stock I was using was 3" x 2" x 0.6," which I had quite a time trying to figure out how to set it in the vice. I may re-design and machine out the vice @winston_moy created that allows you to attach stock like that directly to a low profile clamp, which is perfect for bar-stock. Since the stock was so tall and thin, I had to clamp it as close to the center of rotation as I could; I was able to do this by taking a scrap piece of wax and adding it to the side of the aluminum stock. I did get some pretty bad vibrations though I am not entirely sure if that was due to the way I secured it or from the tooling, which I will get into in a minute. In addition to this, the Pocket NC couldn't reach the top half-inch of the bar stock, so I had to cut out the middle of it and let the upper stock fall on its own after. 

The whole setup was a bit of a challenge in and of itself because I had to figure out how I wanted to keep some sort of lead or peg attaching the stock to the pendant while doing the finishing operations. I ended up adding two legs to the bottom of the necklace, which seemed to work decently well. 

I didn't start very well due to the bits I was using; only more recently have I been doing proper speeds and feeds. Unfortunately, that means before I tore them up pretty bad from taking too massive cuts. They weren't entirely unusable, but the sounds it was making were pretty bad, and the aluminum ended up overheating a few times, so I had to let it rest and spray cold air on it. Since it got so hot, the entire project took me nearly three times as long as it would have. I had to switch out bits every so often due to chip welding and swap them out with other worn endmills, overall, not a great experience. 

After I got the bulk of the material removed, I was able to start working on the finishing passes. For this, I used a 1/8" ball endmill, 1/16" ball mill, and a 1/32" vee bit ball endmill. I started with the 1/8" tool and made my way down using adaptive clearing operations to ensure I wasn't removing more material than the bit could handle. Since the pendant has many small details, if I were to do a standard finishing pass, the tools may dig in areas where other endmills couldn't get to and dive into it, possibly snapping the endmill.  

I messed up pretty bad on the top of the necklace where you would attach a chain and accidentally dove the 1/32" vee bit into it when I forgot the set the tool length. It was right after I spent six hours on the project and had to leave the project for a few hours so as not to go insane. 

After a lot of thought, I ended up finishing the pendant even though I would have to figure out another way of attaching a hoop to pass a chain through. I guess I was pretty frustrated because I ended up making another mistake and setting the ball endmill to cut farther into the pendant than it should, so the front isn't as lovely as it could be. Finally came the point to take it off its pegs that attached to the stock; this proved to be more comfortable than I thought, I just did two adaptive clearings with the 1/8" ball endmill and have very small step-downs on each side until it parted off. 

I ended up taking a Dremel to it and shave off the top loop and just poke a hole through the top of the musical note. I used the same tool to also clean the bottom from the leftover bits from the cut off operation. 

It's not the cleanest work I've done, and I am still a bit peeved at the mistake I made by ruining the top of the necklace. It has been a roller coaster of an experience, and I may attempt it again when I get new endmills. The entire project took about 8 hours, which I am not super happy with, and on a second attempt, I think I can cut that in half or more. 

A few weeks back, someone on Instagram contacted me and asked if I would be willing to make them a bishop chess piece approx two and a half inches high from their design. I thought it'd be a fun project, so I took it on. He gave me an STL file, which I converted to the Fusion format .f3d; I had some issues at first where it wouldn't want to turn due to the high amount of faces in the model. I was able to combat this by reducing the triangles from about 40,000 to just under 3,000. The quality went down a bit because of this, but not by any significant amount that it would be noticeable in the final production. 

For the milling operations, I did 3+2 axis adaptive clearing and only came in from 4 sides to do it all. I had some walnut blocks that I used for other projects, so I used that for the stock. I used a 1/8" 4 flute ball endmill to do the entire operation with finishing passes and took about 2 hours to machine. I accidentally miscalculated one of the adaptive clearing operations. I cleared away too much stock from the underside of the bishop, not allowing enough support to do the final finishing pass. 

I restarted with new stock; this time didn't cut away any of the material from the underside of the piece until all other operations where complete. I also had some issues with the Pocket NC V1, where the tool wouldn't align properly, but I think that's due to my mismeasurement. So I left it as is until the new machine would come in, and I would restart the project from scratch.

A couple of days ago, my sister asked if I would be able to machine a custom piece of jewelry to give as a gift to one of her friends. I thought the idea would be an exciting challenge, so I took it on.

The design was pretty basic, the trinity symbol in the back, and a musical note in front. I used images I found online and turned them into SVG files, which I imported into Fusion360, from there I was able to extrude the pieces I wanted and smoothed over the edges to give it a more delicate feel. She wanted it to be a necklace in aluminum, so I would need to add a hoop at the top to pass a chain through. 

Since she wanted it in aluminum, I wanted to do the model first in wax to see if any modifications would be necessary that wouldn't be obvious on screen. The entire operation took about an hour and a half, and I used three different tools to do the milling job. First was the 1/8" 4 flute ball endmill to do the bulk of the material removal. Next up, I used a 1/16" 4 flute ball bit to get the finer details in that the larger 1/8" couldn't understand. And finally was a 1/32 ball-tipped vee bit, this allowed me to get those tiny details around the side of the musical note. I'm a little bit dreading the aluminum process as I haven't done any aluminum cuts on this specific machine yet. 

I'm incredibly pleased with the whole project so far, and I have to say its one of my favorites so far. 

At long last, I have finished the video aspect of the unboxing and setup of the Pocket NC. I plan on doing a voice-over explaining what I am doing and what issues I ran into while setting it up sometime this or next week. I've been putting off working on it mostly because I haven't done anything like it before.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and was able to follow a few different tutorials online. I ran into some weird issues where when I tried exporting the video, it would only take the visual footage and natural noises and not the music, which I was able to fix by restarting the program. Premiere Pro isn't super clear when exporting in different video formats like mp4 style formats (that Instagram accepts) and so I had to find the scientific names for them. 

The Pocket NC arrived yesterday and is fantastic! The box the machine came in very well packaged with no wiggle room for the machining to move around during shipping.  It had a few tools like Allen keys and a wrench to change endmills, it also came with a single flute 1/8" carbide bit for cutting soft plastics, and even came with two 2" cubes of wax.

The startup manual was very clear and straightforward, which can't always be said for other machines. However, when I was setting up the bed I ran into a slight issue, the brace that holds the camp system was a very tight fit without any hardware/locating pins and I ended up having to use a rubber mallet to tap it into place. I first tried to put it together myself without instruction, but when it didn't fit I thought maybe I didn't install it correctly, I found a tutorial page that described what I was already doing. 

Other than the clamp system, the whole machine was straightforward to set up and took under an hour to get it all hooked up with the user interface and ready to start an operation. Before doing any test cuts, I installed the single flute 1/8" endmill it came with and went to the tooling section of the interface. Setting the tool was very easy and took under 30 seconds to do. Compared to the v1 model, which would require you to measure the distance, the endmill came out of the holder and then entered that into an equation that you would put the results into the tool table. 

I then went to Fusion360 and setup the CAM end of it, which consisted of downloading the table and vice and setting the origin height according to the specific machine offset found in the manual. When Pocket NC builds its machines, there are slight discrepancies between each Pocket NC; this doesn't mean there is any functional difference. There just might be a couple of thousands of an inch farther away or closer to the center origin of the machine bed. 

One slight downside to setting up the machine was the information was kind of scattered around a few different pages, it wasn't hard to find it just would have been more comfortable in one location. 

For the first cut, I set it to surface the wax cube it came with to ensure it all lined up correctly. Uploading the g-code to the machine was so easy compared to their v1 model, and the speed it read the information and was ready to run was terrific, what would typically take 1-3 minutes for uploading a facing operation to the v1 model it did it in under a second for the v2. After the file uploaded, it was all ready to start; I love how the button on the machine blinks green when it's ready to start. I almost jumped when I pressed the cycle start because the machine moved so quickly, I was expecting it to be pretty similar to their v1 model, but it ran much more smoothly and with speed. The facing operation took off maybe 0.001" of stock from the top, which is better than I was expecting for the first operation to be so accurate. 

Overall I am super pleased with the V2-10, and it is night and day difference between this and the old Pocket NC model.

I recorded myself taking it all out and setting it up and will be editing that and posting it to Youtube with a voiceover. 

Since Oneshop is closing down, I needed to find a new space to put the Pocket NC and settled upon the home garage. It was mostly empty, and other family members didn't frequent it too often, so it was the ideal choice. I only had a couple of white folding tables in there previously, so I decided to build a workbench to have a more solid workspace. I still had access to Oneshop which wouldn't be closing for a while yet so I wanted to do the project there.

I liked the design my grandfather used to build him, so I recreated it in Fusion360 and modified it to my liking. I did do some research online to see what other people did for making worktables, and for the most part, they all followed the same general design using 2x4's for the support and plywood for the top.

I had some extra time to play around with the design, so I went over to the drawing section of Fusion to make some basic plans I could follow when building it with measurements and diagrams showing how it all fitted together. I was already somewhat familiar with how the projects should look to minimize any repetition.

I used 1/2" plywood I found lying around at Oneshop and used that for the top of the worktable. For the legs, I had initially designed it to use 4x4" boards, but lowes didn't have any readily available when I went in, so I decided to double up on 2x4" instead. The whole process only took me about 4 hours to assemble, including some sanding. All in all, the entire project only cost me about $40 to build, which I am delighted as other tutorial videos I've seen fall around $100.