The X-Carve Assembled and Working after a Two-Week Learning Curve
A few months ago we purchased a 2D CNC Die Cutter called the Silver Bullet. Our intended use was to cut out the precise shapes of the wood veneers that are inlaid into the carbon fiber laminate of our furniture.
The Silver Bullet is about best-in-class for what it does – cut out card stock for wedding invitations. It cuts, draws and engraves about any lightweight material for thousands of happy hobbyists, and even a few folks that make a living from it. It is part of the DIY (do it yourself) phenomena that I totally missed out on.
It has Purpose – Perfectly Formed Silicone Gaskets for our D-Bracket Tripod Mount
Our hopes that it would cut the veneer, and perhaps even carbon fiber fabric were optimistic. We have since found a better method to cut the fabric, and although it works fine for the veneers, it communicates only in the language of the DIY crowd – Adobe Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG).
Us aerospace folks live in a CAD and solid modeling world where .dxf and .stp files are the spoken language across platforms. Searching for a solution, I came across the Inventables Website, and discovered an entirely new DIY crowd of home CNC machinists – Github Geeks! Not only do they build their own machines, but they swap out an array of controller hardware and write Java scripts to make it all work.
So the Silver Bullet sole purpose now is to cut the silicone sheet seals that are needed for the camera D-Bracket tripod mount we are building. The X-Carve is perfect for the veneer cutouts, and I can take my Autodesk Inventor files and import them into Fusion 360 to write the tool paths. From there it gets complication as we use Java based Chilipeppr to process the Fusion files and some (I forgot) post processor to send the gcode to the X-Carve.
If your brain is hurting from just reading this, imagine mine and Raul’s (my engineering technician that made this all work) after two weeks!
It took him four days just to assemble it, and both of us lost two days just to get it to work. And actually we would still be stumped had not a great guy from Warsaw, Poland remotely accessed our computer for “reflash” the Arduino/gShield Motion Controller Kit.
Given it is a 3-axis machine, we can actually fabricate some of our smaller tooling. But the rails are a little wobbly when cutting MIC-6 aluminum. So our solution is to stiffen them up with some custom unidirectional carbon fiber I-beams we fabricated over the weekend.
Life would be so simple if we had a nice used Hass Milling Machine and MasterCAM. Maybe next year!
