What?
Use the CNC router to make a maze out of wood. The maze has to have quarter inch channels and quarter inch dividers between the channels. First create the maze in inventor than the final project should be cut out of a piece of wood.
Idea.
My idea was to make a regular square maze and add some handles to the sides. I looked at some picture on the internet and I want to add some handles so that the maze can be tilted to make the ball barring go through it. Lots of the ones on the internet had a glass top so the ball wouldn't roll out but for the project right now we are just trying to learn how to use the CNC so I'm going to keep it simple.
The first thing I did was build the channels of my maze in inventor. Many people started on graph paper and I would probably suggest that in the future but I started in inventor and it was too late to turn back. I made a rectangular cube the size of the final maze then started a 2D sketch on one side for the channels.
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I first set up my material so the x, y, and z planes were set up the same as the CNC router. Then I added a 3D contour cutting path to cut out all the channels because it ended up being the fastest way. Then I used a 2D contour cutting path to cut out the outside of the maze and the holes in the handles. I had to set it to only cut a quarter inch deep on each pass because otherwise its a lot harder on the CNC router and the material is more likely to move in the process because there will be more stress.
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Once I had all the cutting paths I post processed it to get the gcode that the CNC router will use to know where to cut. The maze is meant to be cut out of wood but since wood takes longer and is more expensive I cut out my firs draft on foam. I cut it out I first had to secure the foam down with carpet tape and set up the router so that the coordinate (0,0,0) was in the right top corner of my piece of foam. Then all I had to do was open and run my gcode and the router did the rest.
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What I learned
During this project I learned a couple new things. For a start I got more practice with inventor to create the design. They I learned how to upload my design from inventor to fusion and use fusion to set up some very basic cutting paths. In the shop I learned how to zero out the x, y, and z axes of the router based on where 0,0,0 is on my file. I am far from a proportional machinist but this project was a little start.