ME 318
ME 318 is an advanced design class at Stanford that teaches you how to use a CNC mill. I took the class during the winter quarter of 2011 and I must say that it was one of the best classes at Stanford. I'm slightly biased because I love working with heavy machinery and the Haas VF-0 is most definitely that. The class required 3 unique projects of increasing complexity, all designed to further our design skills as well as our understanding and usage of a CNC mill. The first project consisted of cutting out a design in card stock that had significance to us. I chose to cut out an interesting pattern of circles, because I had for so long been relegated to manual mills which are not very conducive to cutting circles. For this first project, we were required to write the G-code by hand. This project was intended to give us a decent understanding of the G-code language as well as a respect for the CAM packages that we would soon start using.
The second project was intended to get us thinking about what we wanted to do for our final project. We were told to prototype something we thought we might want to do for our final project and get an idea of how hard our final project would be and how long it would take us to complete the project. An overarching theme of the class was realizing how long it takes to design and cut something using a CNC mill, and this second project reminded everyone of this fact. I estimated that I could finish my prototype in 8 hours, and 24 hours of work later I was still not finished. In the end though, the extra work was worth it. I had decided that I wanted to make a custom ice cube tray out of silicone for my final project, so I decided to do a mini version for the second project. I used the solidworks mold tool-suite to design a single ice cube mold. I chose to make an ice cube in the shape of the first letter of my name: a "W".
The third project involved designing a bottle opener that could both pop and twist off bottle caps. The kicker was that the design had to be cut into stainless steel. This project gave me a much greater respect for objects milled from steel as opposed to much softer materials like aluminum and brass. I had never worked with stainless steel before this project.
I have always had a fascination with dinosaurs and so I chose to mill a T-Rex bottle opener. I designed the mouth to be able to pop off a bottle caps and the spikes on the dinosaurs back to be capable of twisting a bottle cap. I used the lasercam to get the dimensions of the features just right so that I could mill the final version in stainless and be sure that it would open a regular size bottle. When you're working with stainless it's very important to measure twice and cut once.
I have always had a fascination with dinosaurs and so I chose to mill a T-Rex bottle opener. I designed the mouth to be able to pop off a bottle caps and the spikes on the dinosaurs back to be capable of twisting a bottle cap. I used the lasercam to get the dimensions of the features just right so that I could mill the final version in stainless and be sure that it would open a regular size bottle. When you're working with stainless it's very important to measure twice and cut once.
The fourth project was also our final project; the culmination of everything that we had learned during the quarter. Since I was very happy with the results of my ice cube mold prototype, I decided to continue with the idea. This time I chose to machine a mold of all the letters in my name. I'm glad I made a prototype of the ice cube tray mold before attempting the final version, because it gave me a chance to improve upon my initial design. For the final design I added a couple of neat features. Since it is very easy to make more ice cube trays because I have the mold, I wanted to make sure they were designed to be stacked on top of each other without sticking to one. I also adjusted the thickness of the ice cube tray material so that it was more rigid and less likely to tear. The first iteration was dangerously thing and everytime I removed the ice cube I worried I was going to tear the silicone.