Of course I encourage my kids to do as well at school as they possibly can. Seems to me that they both could work a little harder at that, but for the most part they are doing pretty well. My son Max is sitting at a B in Science this quarter, and is looking for a way to bring his grade up to an A. They were just assigned a fairly major project about a week ago, due this coming Tuesday, to draw a 3D poster of a plant or animal cell, and label all the parts.
Now Max has been watching my intake manifold progress without a whole lot of interest, but obviously he was noticing all the time I have spent recently in front of the CNC machine. So, he approached me with the idea of doing a CNC "poster", where we cut out all the components by programming the CNC machine, and then he could color it in to brighten it up a little bit. I thought this was a great idea; it was an opportunity to show my twelve year old son some of the ideas behind CAD programs and CNC, and reinforce the idea that math is important (I don't think he is quite getting that yet
). Since this idea was a little different than what was described in his teacher's assignment sheet, I had him check with the teacher to make sure it would be OK. We got the go-ahead on Thursday, and started planning the project.
Max did some internet research and came up with a diagram of a plant cell that we could draw up and cut out on the CNC. Friday night we got started on this; basically I sat Max down in front of my computer and showed him how to draw lines, arcs, circles and other objects in CAD, and then showed him how to dimension things so that we could transfer the file to the CNC. I also showed him how to copy and paste, and rotate components in the drawing. He got the majority of the job done on Friday night in the first couple hours, with me standing there and coaching him on the ways he might want to draw certain structures. It was helpful that we were going to translate to CNC, because some of the structures were long, curving tubes. I told him we would just cut those as indentations in the plate with an end mill of the correct size, and so he didn't have to draw the closed shape, just a line that represented it.
Friday night after he was in bed I added a little detail to his drawing, and then started programming the CNC machine. I thought I might be able to get it done pretty fast, but at 2:00 AM it dawned on me that this was going to take a LOT longer than I had originally anticipated. I went to bed on Friday night hoping that I could get finished up by noon on Saturday if I got going at a reasonable hour.
What a joke my timeline turned out to be LOL! I spent 15 hours on Saturday continuing to try to get the part programmed on my CNC machine. I ended up with 9 different programs, over 400 steps in the machine's conversational programming mode, and heaven knows how many lines of G code. The only break I had all day was when Barry R gave me a call and we got a chance to talk some horsepower, and later when our family went out to dinner. Max spent the day inside playing computer games. Hmmmmm....
Finally late in the afternoon I made him come out to the shop and punch some numbers into the machine for me, so that he had an idea of what that was all about. But I guess I can't blame him for not wanting to sit there all day while I wrote a continuous string of programs for the project. By 1:00 AM on Sunday I'd had enough, but I was done with everything except the labels on the parts of the cells, and the arrows pointing from the labels to the cells.
Sunday morning I did the text and arrows, and then wrote the program to cut the whole piece out of the 1/4" aluminum plate that I was using for the project. I had been cutting as I wrote, so this basically finished it all up. The crowning touch was that I broke the 1/4" carbide end mill that I used to cut the piece out when the piece shifted as the last cut was made. This may be the last time that I volunteer for a CNC project for my son LOL!
In any case, though, it turned out really well. Max took the finished plate and colored some parts of the cell, and also the text, to make everything stand out. Here are a couple of pics of the plate as it came out of the CNC machine, and after Max got done coloring it. The photos aren't the greatest, but you'll get the idea:
Looks like I'll have to wait on getting back to the sheet metal intake until next weekend. Max better get an A on that project...
