CNC Milling: DIY House Number Plate

For this week's assignment, we were to create a simulation program for a lathe machine. After going through Jennifer's CAM files of phone case and Hass tool path, I went through some of YouTube tutorial videos such as:

link .

I played around with all tools under 2D milling and drilling. Further, I wanted to create something for my own use. I came across Aluminum number plates available on Etsy. I thought of designing one for my home.

Available tools:

Fusion360

Let's get started!!

So, first I started with designing a house number plate which would be simple yet classy.

Components involved-

Box, Cylinders, Text Sketch, Holes

Further, I went into the manufacturing mode of Fusion360 to create my program for lathe machine.

Operations I selected for my end product (most can be found in the dropdown in the image above):

1. Face - Removes all material from top of stock to top of model

2. 2D Adaptive Clearing - Creates a roughing operation on the model, uses a more optimized tool path to avoid abrupt direction changes

3. 2D Pocket - Creates a roughing operation, uses tool path parallel to selected geometry

4. Drill - for drilling, tapping and hole making operations such as counterbores

5. 2D Contour - Multiple roughing and multiple depth cuts for any contour

There are many drilling tools available, so after going through all, I decided to use

1. SpotDrill (used to identify the holes and create a "dimple" in the workpiece so that the twist drill does not deflect and "walk" off-center),

2. Bore mill and

3. Counterbore mill (used to enlarge the opening of a hole producing a flat bottom)

However, Fusion 360 offers the Hole Recognition feature. So, I wanted to explore its accuracy. I enabled it from my student account. It identifies all holes (circular shapes as it didn't identify the hole in 0 of my number plate) and gives option of selecting what kind of boring to do with each type of hole as can be seen in snapshot above.

The next snapshot shows the operations that got autogenerated under the category of Hole Recognition1 due to the operation as per our selection.

So, first I performed manually, then inserted the auto-recognition to check for its validity. Both are more or less similar as can be seen in the final simulation video.

After placing right combination of operations, finally the number plate is ready as can be seen in the following video:

I have added the demo stl file here above.

Further, I designed a sturdy soap stand which I could lathe out of aluminum. I prepared its stock in setup in similar process. While milling, I observed that there were many collisions which arise when the tool path collides with the stock (as can be seen in snapshot above). So, to avoid that, we have to disassemble the horizontal and vertical parts.

I shall be updating for them in the next instructable post!! Stay tuned!!