FEB 26th / MAR 07 - CNC DRAWING



The progress I made since the CNC demo has been slow comparatively. I had to clean up my files and organize the layers into colors to prepare for printing. This week I am preparing to try my file on the CNC machine. That is tomorrow's project because Thursday morning was the only time I was available. I will update this post after that process.

On FEB 27th and MARCH 3rd I printed my drawing on the CNC machine. Overall I'd say it took 4 1/2 hours. 

The first two layers, I did in one session. They had wider grid infills but covered more space overall so they each took about the same time as the final layer, around an hour and a half each. The first layer was done in red and green. I switched to green because the pen ran out of red ink. I was using a color changing pen for ease of color switching.

After the end of the first print I switched to blue for the second layer. I didn't have to re-home it or anything because I was just clicking a button on the pen.

The blue ink lasted the entire print, surprisingly and I was quite happy about that. For the final layer I switched to black. Something I discovered halfway through was that I had forgotten to select and remove duplicate lines because the machine was tracing over each of the infill lines twice and the outlines three times. This actually created a really solid black layer which I liked, but led to some issues later. 

I sped up the machine for the last stretch of the drawing because I was running out of time. Doing so must have put too much stress on the pen tip or shook the machine so much that the pen was suddenly not touching the paper at all. I tried stopping and starting it, shifting the pen down to make contact with the paper again, switching colors, switching pens entirely but nothing worked out. There is a little bit of infill missing towards the upper right corner of the drawing because of this.

The print was mostly organized by distance from origin, but a sorting method like that didn't work perfectly well when all the lines were crossing over each other. It always left the right corner to last but it was never entirely empty by that point. 

So aside from that little technical difficulty it went pretty smoothly overall. 

















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