2019cnc4-5

CNC WEST April/May 2019 www.CNC-West.com 27 else. Some students do complex designs with harder fea- tures, while others just do the bare minimum. The whole time they have thought it all through on how they are go- ing to manufacture their drawing. Well surprise, they are working from a drawing they have never seen before, just like in industry.” Students now have to figure out how to produce the part of the drawing and hope that all the in- formation is easily conveyed. If not they have to go back to the designer and work with them to get the specs they need to produce the part correctly. That is just the north end. The south end is done on the CNC utilizing Fusion 360. “They learn to use the CAM software and see all the simulations,” continues Sherry “They specify the tooling, speeds and feeds and all that goes along with it. Output- ting the G Code to the correct machine, setting it up and running it. South is all CNC and north is all manual. It allows them to compare the two similar experiences. How long did it take you to make the north end? 2 hours, ok. How long to do the south end? Three hours to program it and 2 minutes cutting chips. Now they start to see the threshold of when is it worth their time to invest in the CAM software versus just cranking it out manually with a sketch drawing.” Mechanical engineering majors make up a large por- tion of the students enrolled at the UC Davis College of Engineering, but the Bio Med students have their own interesting shop project. The BIM 110L project is a digi- tal microscope assembly. The assembly is a cell phone stand embedded with an inexpensive magnifying lens to which the cell phone’s camera is aligned producing a magnified image of a specimen. Bio Med students are not as much into manufacturing, but they still need to learn how to program on the machines. “Our manual applica- tions translate to the CNC on the Bridgeports,” explains Shawn. “They really learn fast based off what we give them. They learn thread milling for example, and let me say left and right hand threads are a completely foreign concept to most of them. Always a manual op first, then again utilizing the 3 axis ACU-RITE controllers on our Bridgeports. The Bio Med students don’t go through the CAM training, but instead they learn conversational right on the machine. Everything they program they do directly on the ACU-RITE controllers and it is easy. They pick it up really quickly. The controls are easy to learn, easy to use, and user intuitive. It is extremely powerful once you get to use to it.” Students are required to build a gearbox that hauls 20lbs of text books up a 60 degree slope. Fastest time wins and is usually under 80 seconds. For the last ten weeks students have been designing and fabricating the parts to make the gearbox. It is powered off of two AA batteries and a tiny little cheap electric motor. They are working with a lot of gears, making bearings, shafts and the chassis. They are turning RPM into torque.