Moving to acrylic…

The next phase of this project is to move into creating the same mechanism as before, the whitworth quick return, but out of acrylic instead of chip board. After consulting Brian Slocum, I was able to see flaws in my initial design and had to make some adjustments in order to all the mechanism to work properly out of the new material. Designing this on Fusion was relatively simple as I had a good base to work off of.

After this I went into laser cutting, which was the most frustrating aspect of this project. The initial dimensions of my mechanism were too large and I either had to shrink it down on the trotec software and not have the exact measurements, or redesign on Fusion. I chose to do a combination of the two which worked out well.

The next steps of this included putting the pieces together. The main issues I ran into was the depth at which to place the hinge at the bottom and the the height of the tracks at the top. This is something I will be revisiting as the mechanism does not move as smoothly as I believe it should.

 

The steps I took:

Step one- Draft out the the design and draw it out to brainstorm how the mechanism should look and what would be needed for it to work. The numbers in the photograph below indicate the number of acrylic pieces stacked on top of one another.

 

Step two – make adjustments to the original design on Fusion, making sure to keep in mind the backing of the mechanism as the base board to work off of.

Step three- laser cut, as shown in the first image above. The issue I ran into was making sure that the correct cut type was matched with the correct lines. There were sections that I was trying to etch into the material and not cut, and this would change on the software between cuts which caused me some headaches.

Step four – Assemble the acrylic pieces together and test. As mentioned above,