We didn’t get any suggestions for topics or offers of presentations or sharing for the August Design SIG meeting. A number of members are travelling or preparing to travel, so we’ll skip the SIG meeting this month again. But by September, let’s get together and discuss design ideas for the coming autumn season. Any specific ideas, suggestions, requests, questions, etc are all welcome. Does anyone have some good little projects or special lessons learned on any of the Design tools that they would like to share? The Design SIG belongs to all of us - we want to see and hear about your progress. The last big Design projects were the desks we designed and a number of people helped build for school students in disadvantaged areas of San Diego.
Work and life have been interfering with woodworking and fun, but there have been some opportunities for woodworking projects. Working out design concepts and ideas in CAD can produce results that are more organized, complete, and generate a lot less wood that needs to be recycled. It’s useful to see what things can look like, and find some gotchas before they get ya. Making things proportional doesn’t come intuitively to everyone, but a CAD model gives a preview.
In our June SIG, Lem discussed double sided CNC routing and how to achieve this in CAD. Our Design tools lend themselves well to the Digital tools like 3D printing, CNC routing, and laser cutting/engraving. In addition to the tools in our Shop, a lot of members have digital tools in their own shops. Don’t be shy, the SIG likes to see the fruits of your creative labor. From little Orturs to big Laser tables, 3018 CNC engravers to full sheet CNC routers, and a host of 3D printers using FDM or SLA resin, there are a great variety of tools in the group. We would like to see what you’ve done and learn from your experiences.
Personally, I’ve had fun with the little Ortur laser for engraving, and appreciate the K80s at the shop for cutting more serious thicknesses of wood and acrylic as well as etching images in cutting boards and table tops. I’ve been using a 4K resin printer for high-res plastic product design and am planning to add a Prusa soon. I’ve been learning to generate G-code from Fusion 360 for CNC routing even with the “toy” 3018, but am looking forward to receiving a 32x48 OneFinity router in a few months.
Enjoy your summer, and see you in September!