We held our annual Minnesota Camp Shopbot at Mark Meggit’s place of business, “Foamcarvers”. As the name suggests Mark’s primary business is cutting foam, LOT’S of foam…
This year he has been working on some extremely large projects ( you can see pictures of them on the Shopbot Forum if you type in “Rainforest” in the search feature…). During our Camp Mark, and his daughter Nikki both explained , in great detail, HOW they were able to design, cut, and finish such a large ( 24 ‘, by 17’ by 10’thick….) project. They used Artcam Pro to generate their “sliced”cutting files, and numerous exterior coatings to enable the project to withstand the extreme conditions it will be subjected to when it is finally installed in Cairo, Egypt…
As you can see from the smaller project shown above they have worked out a system that enables them to protect the foam (standard DOW styrofoam) from the elements, and they gave us the “recipes”used to create their coatings. As a result of this initial project they are now starting to receive more orders for other pieces on a scale much larger than many people have tried before.
In addition to the Rain Forest project they also showed how they are incorporating a variety of other machinery to complement the work done on their Shopbot. Everything from thermoforming, extruder coating, and even plasma cutting all have a place in their shop !
We also had a number of interesting “Show and Tell ” items brought in, and each year the samples get better , and better.
Jim Frost brought in some cribbage boards and explained his technique of creating relief files, as well as a sign created from recycled plastic decking.
Randy Nelson brought in a lamp which he “turned”on his indexer.
Gary Chiles created a dust collection “foot”that uses rare earth magnets to make adjustments easy.
Tadd Rapant created a small ‘car bank/mailbox’ which he incorporated with store bought parts.
For pictures of these projects you can go to the Camp Shopbot Flickr page; http://www.flickr.com/photos/campshopbot
In addition to the samples brought in we had a good discussion about the various types of vacuum hold downs which people are using for their projects, and as a group the people attending are going to try and organize a ‘group buy’ of Trupan from one of their local plywood distributor(s).
I think that Mark has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities with his techniques, and everyone at the Camp went away with some ideas for future projects of their own…
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