Every submarine needs a dock and the Mechanical fish sub is no different. In fact this dock will be as imaginative as the fish itself. The mechanical fish and dock use just about every trick in the book. As always, the vectors were first. Everything except the letters were created in EnRoute
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
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
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
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.
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
EnRoute is a at program to generate routing files and I use it for that every time I need a piece cut. But I also find EnRoute is a great program to use when I need to create a file of any size that needs to be precise. I’ve used it to generate the plans for all sorts of projects including layouts for the Adventure Golfs we build and our property layout for when we were building our house. Yesterday I needed to draw a plan I would send off to the folks who were cutting us a thick glass coffee table top. We had hand sculpted the base of the table to look like the 400 year old trees of a plantation my clients had visited in Florida
I absolutely love designing in EnRoute on the computer and then routing our pieces on the MultiCam but the truth is that this most often gets us about 50% of where we are going. It’s a good thing I also love to do the hand work and finishing. The WhistlePunk Hollow Adventure Golf project is now in it’s final stages after more than six months of production. All of the features except the small signs we built with the help of the software and machine are now installed
The projects I build all start with a pen and ink concept drawing (now digital). This drawing is my way to work out many of the challenges. Even so it is kept loose – all freehand in order to allow lots of ‘wiggle room’ to facilitate the addition of new and better ideas as the build begins. The Institute for Study of Mechanical Fish challenge sign is no different