Hello from Switzerland

[chrisgage]

Hi,
I am normally resident in Raleigh, NC, but on temporary assignment in Lausanne Switzerland.

I am a retired IBM software engineer and have worked with IBM customers in the old days when IBM was big into CAD/CAM, and attended a lot of classes then myself. I also run an online book collection at http://www.ibiblio.org/britishraj which is made entirely from OCR processing of image PDFs at the Internet Archive.

In building a scanner, I am working closely with my son Alex who is a Mechanical Engineer recently graduated from Virginia Tech. He has had a great deal of experience with CNC during his college years, and is a Student Expert and Certified Instructor for Autodesk Inventor. Last week we started off as complete newbies in bookscanners, and ended up at the end of the week with a fully built scanner (minus the cameras so far), thanks to TechShop RDU.

We went in there to have a guided tour at lunchtime on Tuesday 15th May and after the tour we said we'd like to take the required course on the ShopBot. They said "When?" and I jokingly said, "well, its five minutes to one, how about one o’clock?" Everyone thought this was very funny, but they said they'd let us know. We drove home, about 15 minutes away, and almost as we got in the door, the phone rang and it was TechShop saying, "You’re on for two o’clock." So we turned around and went back. The instructor, Sally, took us through a two hour session showing us all the procedures for setting up and running the ShopBot and how to use VCarve Pro to create the files to be run on the Shopbot. We each made a small "initiation project", and we took a short written test, and we were ready to make a scanner.

We went back home again and spent several hours that evening pulling the "official" design into Autodesk Inventor, and assembling it in the software. We now have a "fully functional" version of the scanner inside Inventor, i.e. the parallelogram levers work and raise the cradle, the cradle slides, and the cradle leaves adjust. All the wood joints, screws, nuts, bolts, bearings are in there exactly as it would be in real life.

We went back to TechShop the following day with a sheet of reasonably good 3/4 ply from Home Depot. We used Vcarve Pro and recreated the toolpaths from scratch including an initial hold down path, and ordered the paths a little differently, but the design did not change. It took about an hour and 15 minutes to cut. We learned a great deal. We had about 15 hold downs for the 8x4 sheet but there should have been more, so as a consequence in some places we didn't cut through the last 1/64th of the plywood so we had some flash to clean off.

We had our picture taken as we left... http://www.flickr.com/photos/techshoprdu/7251277776/

I will post pictures in the build thread, if I can find out how to post pictures...

[daniel_reetz]

Welcome to the forums, Chris! Congrats on your new build.

Can you and Alex please share your Inventor file at your earliest convenience?

[daniel_reetz]

BTW, when you post, under the text box there is an "upload attachment" tab. That will allow you to attach a picture or a zipped copy of your Inventor file.