- I was completely amazed that the tabs fit the slots perfectly. That being said, I would rather see all the tabs milled down to some size like 0.6 inches -- something guaranteed to be less than the plywood thickness, and then size the slots accordingly.
- For the fixtures where the bearing pockets are cut on the reverse of the parts, most of the bearing pockets were misaligned. I will have to cut those parts again, probably I messed up the drawing.
- Lots of tabs are needed for the big parts, and the tabs should be larger than I used, which was 0.25 x 0.2.
- Despite the fact that the ShopBot I use has a vacuum bed, the plywood has a bow to it. While the vacuum flattens the plywood out, as material is removed, the vacuum becomes less effective. At one point one corner of the plywood sprang up. So I'm going to recommend holddowns, and I'm going to add a holddown toolpath so you know where to put the holddowns.
- I still don't see the purpose behind that 0.7 in deep slot on the cradle. The 0.4 in slot I can understand, but the 0.7 in slot leaves a paper-thin flap of wood that just breaks off. I'll remove it unless Dan says what it's for!
- I thought I was clever -- there are seven parts which need reversing for the bearing pockets, so I put in seven fixtures. Bad idea -- it wasted 16 minutes cutting the extra three fixtures which could have been spent reusing the four fixtures.
- Stupid me, I ended up with the fixtures in the most inconvenient corner of the ShopBot, so I had to climb up on the bed to fixture the parts.
- One file took 40 minutes to cut, the other took 60, but subtract 16 for the extraneous fixtures, so 45 minutes. This was at 12,000 rpm and 3.5 inches per second, with 0.25 inches depth per pass.
Next weekend I'll fix up the file, recut some parts, and hopefully I'll be able to publish the files.
