Saturday, June 6, 2009

Bat Tops!



After getting our machine in September of 2008, we wanted to have a "coming out" at our annual event for our museum members. I designed a toy top based on an image of a bat skeleton that we could give away as tokens of our esteem.


The image was brought into PartsWorks using the bitmap tracing tool, then saves as a DXF. I reopened in AutoCAD, scaled, and traced with a polyline. Once that was completed I found and marked the objects center of mass, and resaved. Re-opened in PartsWorks to repeat into a grid and establish cutting paths. The calculated cut time for the engraving of the skeleton was taking over an hour. Since this was going to be a demonstration, we set up a registration system where we could engrave all of the sheets, then demo the cutting of the profiles. Even so, there was no way we could have a "just in time" inventory during the event. We pre-made a few hundred of the tops earlier in the day.

Here is a video of the finished product. The axle is made from a medium-sized Miller Dowel, a specialty cabinet making product. The point was made my chucking it up in a cordless drill and running it against a spinning abrasive disk.





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