Recently our office formed a soccer team.  I’ve never played soccer but I joined anyway.  So far it’s been a lot of fun, but it started reminding me of the hockey team I played on last summer.  We had fun, but scored very few goals.  In our first soccer game we didn’t score at all.  In our second game we still lost, but we scored twice.  To be precise, one of us scored twice.  She was the hero of the day, all the more because she isn’t a regular player.  I decided that Mo deserved to gloat a bit, but in order to gloat…you need a good conversation starter.  Like, a trophy!  It would be really great if we had an MVP trophy to pass around.  I started designing the trophy.  I really wanted “MVP” written around a “ball”.  Getting this done turned out to be a bit more work than I expected.  TurboCAD Pro can write text on a path, however I only have the “Average Joe” edition.  The difference in cost is about $1000, so an upgrade was out of the question.  Instead I started with InkScape.  Inkscape will create text on a path, so I created a circle and put the text on it.  From Inkscape, I exported the text as a DXF and pulled it into TurboCAD.  From there I was able to tweak it and finally pull it into CAMBam.

I wanted the base of the trophy to be round, and to have “SET SEG Strikers” written on it.  Finally, I wanted to test out my newer mill for this project.  The working area on the mill is only about six inches in Y, so I needed to fit the text in a relatively small area.  It’s also difficult to get the sizing right, because I really wanted to use a 1/8” endmill.  In retrospect, I should have sized the text smaller and used a 1/16” cutter for the circle.

The MVP cutout is the piece that I was most concerned about, however it turned out really well.  Apparently my concern was not warranted.  Toward the end of the cut it started to chatter loose, so I held it down by hand to keep if from getting too dinged up.

Oddly enough it was the base that ended up giving me some trouble.  The letters ran together a bit, which I should have expected…since they cut out exactly the way that they looked on the screen.  One thing that amused me is that people who do their own CNC conversions sometimes refer to a “circle test”.  This is no “test” at all.  If your machine cannot cut a reasonable circle, something is seriously wrong.  Still, I was pleasantly surprised to see how nicely the top circle on the pedestal turned out.  It wasn’t until the program started cutting out the base of the disc that I grew concerned.  It was chattering quite a bit, so I tried to hold it down.  That turned out to be a bad idea because I inadvertently started leaning on the table…and I didn’t notice until it missed a couple of steps.  It the spindle were running at the proper speed, and I had added the encoders to the motors this wouldn’t have been a problem.  I didn’t check the spindle or wire up the encoders yet, though.  The motor missed a couple of X axis steps and it shows on the finished product as a bump in the circle.

  All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results.  I definitely need to get off my duff and add the extra electronics to the mill.  The accuracy on all the cuts (in terms of backlash and repeatability) was really great.