6/5/22 Manufacturing the Racquet Ball Launcher Plates

Colin Szeto

Going to Envision on Sunday. The laser cutter mirrors were misaligned. Therefore I needed to change the laser cut designs so the plates can be cut with the cnc router

Design for the laser cutter

Design for the cnc router. Routing holes were added into the inner corners to account for the tool diameter. 

Figure 1 drilling down the 0,0 point on the material 

Started off with drilling a reference holes at the 0,0 point at the start of the manufacturing. 

initial cut pass, inner holes for one plate

Screwed down the plates onto the sacrificial board.

Melted plastic on bearing holes

The speed of the router bit (24000 rpm) was too fast and melted down the plastic. This tool path was 2D adaptive. This meant that the spindle was in continuous contact with the material and caused the melting of the plastic together.

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Reprogramed tool paths 

To remove the melted plastic I programmed in contours to recut the holes. On the first plate there was an offset of 0.45 mm that I assume was acquired throughout the cut on the y axis. I recentered the bit to the 0,0 hole (see figure 1). This however edited the bore holes (bore holes is the name of the opperatiation, in this case we are cutting out the holes for the bearings to press fit or slide fit into) to be an oblong shape. (I ran the contours program after the 2D adaptive cut) 

For the second plate I included the contour cut directly after the 2D adaptive cuts. This meant that the second tool operation was not affected by my alignment.

All in all this meant that the bearing holes were not perfectly in line with one another.

Here is the finish on the sides of the acrylic with the 1/32 step down programmed into the ramp tool path that used to cut the plates away from the work.

Final product