Many of you recognize the piece that first garnered us national attention. Synergy’s gear set was featured in magazines and on our supplier sites for almost a year. Our friends at Coastal Enterprises even use it as a backdrop print for their trade show booth. That gear now calls Multicam’s Grand Rapids tech center home.

Since we didn’t want the Multicam tech center in Cincinnati, Ohio to feel left out, we decided to build one for their showroom as well. When imagining what the new gear would look like, we decided that it would be a futuristic version of the old gear set and would showcase what we have learned in the last few years.

This write up is a step by step guide on the new gear set. You can see that it’s a very rough and plain drawing.

The first step was to settle on a design that paid homage to the original, but went way beyond. Here is the 2D vector that we settled on. At this point, the only thing we are working with is vector shapes to pull into Enroute Pro

The next step is pulling those vector geometries into Enroute Pro and extruding, texturing, and toolpathing the 3d geometry. I’ll be covering that process at a later date. It deserves its very own write up.

All of the parts were machined from 1″ and 2″ 30lb Precision Board plus. Precision Board allows us to communicate our vision through carving on our Multicam CNC Router like no other material does. Here you see the parts being glued up.

In this step, you see Bryan sanding the Precision Board cut outs with a random orbital sander. What you can also see, is that we plasma cut 10 gauge steel on our Multicam Plasma cutter and bonded it to every HDU part on this project. This allowed us to weld support structure when assembling and made the entire piece very rigid.

Here you see the arms with the lamented steel structure being sealed in by multi purpose bondo. A little sanding after this and we have a part ready for paint.

The gear base sections getting their first coat of paint.

Here is what the gears look like with their base coats finished. Next up glazing.

The next three pictures show the glazing process and yours truly… You can see how amazing they look after one coat of black glaze.

Aubrey painting one of the many coats of Modern Masters paints on the large arms. Aubrey painted on this project for well over 2 days. I think she was happy to see it leave.

Finished picture of the arms after base coat and glazing

Finished pictures of the base parts. The copper on these was an actual reactive copper paint that will oxidize when sprayed with an agent.

Oxidized.

Here is the finished piece. It stands about 5’5″ tall and weighs in at a hight 125lbs while looking much heavier.

We are super excited with the end product. If you want to see it, stop by Multicam’s showroom located at:

MultiCam Ohio Valley
18 Carnegie Way, Cincinnati, OH 45246

Thanks for catching up!

-Jim