Materials: MDF, Wood Glue

Processes: CAD Design, 3-Axis Router, 5-Axis (3+2) Router

Tools: Fusion 360, MasterCam, MultiCam 8000, MultiCam 5000

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About: The goal of this project was to develop a workflow for turning MDF or similar large format sheets and into large objects on a 5-axis router. When you start looking at machining large shapes, material selection quickly becoming a driving factor in the cost of the end product. Furthermore, cycle times can start to grow exponentially if you have large amount of material to remove. For these reasons I wanted to develop a quick and cost-effective 5-axis workflow. This was my introduction to 5-axis, MasterCam, as well as large-scale router work.

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Design: I wanted to see what I could get out of a single 8'x4' sheet of MDF. I started with a sketch of these dimensions in Fusion 360, and from there created some parametric rectangles, that diminished in size, to see how many I could fit onto the sheet. I took those shapes and extruded them on top of each other to create a pyramid shape. It started to look like an X-Wing cockpit so I took the design in that direction. I was able to quickly get a model of the 2D contours, the glued up stock as well as the final object to overlay and import them into MasterCam. The CAM was quite straight forward 3-axis contours for the initial shapes and 3+2 programming for the final piece. The 5-axis machining started with an adaptive roughing cycle and finishing with 2D contours, normal to the objects faces. If I was to do it again I would have incorporated some swarf cuts to spice things up. 

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Machining: I routed out the initial shapes on a MultiCam 5000, including two holes for orientation. From there was the simple task gluing them up. The 5-axis machining was also fairly straightforward with the usual learning curve on new machines. This machine used a very strange controller, including a keyboard featuring Comic Sans keys. The 2D cycle time was orders of magnitude quicker than the 5-axis work. As a result I would spend more time optimizing the 2D shapes to reduce the 5-axis material removal to a minimum. In future trials I will try 3D machining in the 3-axis stage, before the glue-up, to eliminate any roughing cycles. 

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Conclusion: The final product was heavy! If I were to do it again, I would have included voids on the interior of the piece. It would be interesting to see how thin you could make it, while still keeping structural integrity.

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Some post processing would certainly be required on this piece as a result of some less-than-sharp tooling and the nature of MDF. I don't see this as a failure as a piece like this would inevitably get sanded, primed, and pained.  

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