Blogs
Against The Wind: A 2013 Human-Powered Vehicle
Well it's that time of year again! Schools from all over the country recently finished competing in the massive human powered vehicle competitions held each year. Coastal Enterprises was proud to support Missouri S & T students by donating Precision Board Plus HDU...
It needs wings to fly
I jumped the gun on my last entry forgetting to first post the creation of the wing fins and the motor on each end. I used two functions in EnRoute to create the files… sweep two rails and the revolve functions. As always I started with the vectors, created in EnRoute
Building The Perfect Bunny: Soha Sign Co. Tells All
Hopper's House Historic Cottage is the proud owner of a new, great-looking sign boasting a depiction of the loyal guardian bunny "Hopper." Crafted by the creative minds at Soha Sign Co., the Hopper's House sign is as sturdy as it is beautiful. Mike Starks, owner of...
Halo Lit Custom Channel Letter Sign
Our friends at Crestron Electronics hired us to create a front desk lobby sign for their headquarters. We’ll be creating custom channel letters with high gloss black finish mounted to a satin metal box and lit with LEDs. The challenge with this sign was that the box was about 110″ long and our cutting bed was only 96″
Sub started
The thing I love most about our MultiCam is that I can set it up to run in a few minutes and then go away and do something else while the machine turns out the most wonderful pieces and do it more accurately and faster than I ever could. Today I tool pathed the fish submarine and then worked on other things and even took a little time off and visited some friends. When I poked into the shop the pieces were cut perfectly and ready for gluing. I couldn’t resist mixing up a little five minute epoxy and putting it together
Building a fish file
In between all of the paying and house projects I’ve managed to squeeze in a few minutes here and there to work on the mechanical fish challenge project as well. Although the end of summer is still a ways off I’ve learned to push on the front end to avoid all nighters at the back end. I suspect my ‘competition’ has yet to learn that. 🙂 Rather than use a high end 3D program I love to build complex files using EnRoute. With a little planning and some creative use of the available functions some pretty cool stuff can be imagined and then built
Rail plates
The rails for the train require plates and spikes to make them look authentic. These will be glued into place but once finished with the rust paint will look pretty convincing. The vectors were pretty easy and all created inside EnRoute.
Racing In The Mud: The Baja SAE Experience
As far as school clubs go, it doesn't get much cooler than the Baja SAE off-road vehicle team. Earlier in the year we wrote about Cal Poly Pomona and the rugged BAJA SAE car they built for this year's competition. We have since been in touch with Jessica Ghareebo, Cal...
Riding the rails
One of the last items we need to design and create for the WhistlePunk Hollow project are the train rails that will be up on the trestle. The train actually sits on some sturdy angle iron and the rails will be just for show. It made perfect sense to machine them from Precision Board rather than source and purchase the real thing. For the end closest to the public I decided to use 40 lb HDU and for the rest we’ll stick to our usual 30 lb board. The rails are to be machined in halves from 1.5″ thick Precision Board