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Back to Tutorials |
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Designing a casting. Part 4 Completing the Casting |
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With the
location of the bolt holes, Keyway slots, adjuster housings
and recesses now positioned all that remains is to build the face of
the casting between the edges already modelled |
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However, to keep an organised mesh, it is
necessary to build up a framework of edges, before auto filling
individual areas.
Most of the parts we have created for the casting are not in horizontal
alignment so a little bit of work is needed to provide vertices in the
best location for the auto fill. |
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Section
off areas of the casting by extruding edges horizontally or vertically.
Snap the cursor to existing vertices and in cursor select, Scale the
other required vertices along their axis to 0 to align them. |
Use
Auto Fill Shift-F in aligned
regions. Beautify the fill Alt-F
and convert trie's to quads Alt-J.
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| By constraining
regions vertically and horizontally you can construct an
organised mesh. The advantage of doing this are that if alterations are
required to the model selection of aligned rectangles will be much
easier than selecting areas of a mesh made up of disorganised triangles. |
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Before
completing the face of the casting there is one other element that
needs to be fixed to the X-axis slide. That is the support for the
Y-axis.
As I have already roughed out my design I know the locating area for
this needs to be 38mm wide.
The top section of the X-axis needs an area that the Y-axis can be
bolted on to. To save having a left and right-hand X-axis casting I
will incorporate the mounting on both sides of the casting. |
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As
part of the casting's inner face I have incorporated a loop of faces
around the outer edge, these will become a flange to help stiffen the
casting and also give the mounting location for the Y-axis support
bracket. |
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Extrude the holes and the outer
edge back to give the casting thickness.
Once all the elements of the back face are on the correct alignment
build faces between them in a similar manner to the front face. |
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Because
I haven't done any investment casting before I am not sure how thin the
mould can be before it won't fill properly. Because of this I have
increased the thickness behind the pockets to 4mm.
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Select
the loop of faces from around the outer edge of the inner face. These
will be extruded to provide a mounting point for the Y-axis and also
offer some protection to the components of the X-axis.
Extrude the faxes 30mm to clear the V-rollers then cut clearance holes
for the lead screw and guide shaft.
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This
completes the casting for the X-axis of my CNC router. All that
remains is for me to make a wax pattern, which will be fabricated, from
templates printed at a scale of 1 to 1 from the Blender model.
This model
is constructed at finished size. Extra metal will be required on the
areas that are to be machined.
I will detail the progress of the casting in the Engineering section of
this site. |
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