Blogs
Big sculpting day
This week has been a busy one. Today I finally got a little time to put the finishing touches to the beaver sculpt. He looks pretty cool swinging in the center of the circle. Tomorrow we’ll begin the painting process.
Share your Precision Board HDU project!
By now you've probably seen our blog and our monthly "HDU Blog Roundup" featuring the previous month's articles. Did you know we will feature your company and its amazing Precision Board Plus HDU project for free? Increase the visibility and notoriety of your company...
Wooden Instrument Base
Happy New Year! We do a lot of custom CNC work cutting acrylic, aluminum, PVC, HDU Foam and more – We also do CNC machining of wood parts. This project is a wooden base for a measuring instrument. Its a little tricky because there are cuts on both sides that have to be extremely accurate. Once the prototype is complete we’ll go into production cutting 50 of these then off to the paint shop for a coat of polyurethane. We cut the prototype out of Precision Board HDU to start. Then onto the solid Red Oak material.
Routing a rock
A fellow recently set me a picture and asked me to help him out to create a routing file that looked like a specific type of rock. He sent me a bitmap file that was pretty grainy and in fact looked a bit like he had salt and peppered it. These are things that affect the results I would get but I decided to give the file a whirl to see what I would get. This is the original file I was sent
Wagon wheel sign glued
The wagon wheel sign pieces have gathered dust for almost a month as we were so busy with other things. Today the shop was quiet and I finally got the chance to do some assembling. First I had to create a file and cut the center layer to accommodate the steel frame. This frame would be welded up segments of 5/8″ steel rod and a piece of horizontal 1.5″ square tubing. The slots for the 5/8″ tubing would be cut into the material.
Painting faux granite or concrete
For the big 3D globe logo the client asked to it to look like concrete or granite. There are plenty of ways to do this but the easiest is with paint. The fellow who is making the globe will most likely have the globe hard coated with a bed liner type spray. This will leave a slightly bumpy texture. The piece can then be painted a solid or blended solid color with as many coats as necessary
Double sign tree complete
The double sign tree took a while to do because the sculpting and painting were fit around the many other projects underway in the shop. Jenessa did the sculpting and painting on the balloon sign and did a great job too! Amazingly, this was only the second sculpture she has done. Hailey called first dibs on painting the carousel horse. Every color got three coats – all hand painted. That’s a lot of skilled cutting! The horse turned out great! Once the signs and tree were all painted up they looked pretty cool! The piece will go outside next week, ready for delivery and installation right after New Years.
UCSD Human Powered Submarine Takes The Plunge
UCSD ASME students took the plunge with their Human Powered Submarine, "Legasea", at the 12th International Submarine Races in Bethesda, MD, this past June. The event was held at the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in the David Taylor Model...
Slicing and dicing (Creating a 3D logo PART TWO)
With the relief creed and sliced it was time to hollow out each section. It’s not hard but it does have to be done in a particular order. First I created an oval inside each section, making sure the border width took into account the slope of the side of the piece. I did this by selecting the new oval vector and then hitting render what I could see the slopes as they related to the size of the oval. I then selected all of the oval vectors and made them into zero height reliefs