Desigining the Boards

snoCAD

This is a week late. No photos from today (Monday 27 February) as I forgot to take the camera. But we have some great video that I’ll post when I get it back from the AV production guys.

This was the second group to do the designs for their boards using snoCAD. We made good progress until lunch time when there was a general testing of the rules with all but 1 of the students returning late and facing exclusion from the rest of the class. All of the students have been informed of the rules and this has being reinforced at each break. However there is always a bit of testing occurring about this time of year when the students begin to feel more comfortable in their environment and begin test the boundaries. Each time this occurs we stick to our guns, follow the procedures and adjust the lesson plan to try to catch up next class when we start off with a clean sheet.

This gets a bit disappointing because I can see that there are things that need to get done now if this whole project is to arrive where it should in September. I’ve explained this and given out a timeline but it is just toooooo far away for these guys to get.

So before all this happened the Yellow team had completed the overall designs and made the DXF files. The DXF processing takes a while so we aim to do this over lunch break. Some of the boards are looking good and I’m hoping to do some swapping about and testing of the different designs when we get to the snow. There will be only 3 different lengths but a whole bunch of other ideas going on within this.

One of the student boards based on a 153cm length.

We also made a start on the jigs. These are a female former for vacuum bagging the boards. They will be made up of 20 odd MDF profiles laminated together. Using the CNC we’ll cut them out and then glue and laminate.

Using snoCAD we designed a very thin board with the sort of profile that we want for the boards. Once the DXF file is made we discard the top half and complete the shape using Xilog+ ready for machining.

Next week we are machining the jigs. More then.

Using snoCAD for the jig.

Finally a big thanks to Dan from graf snowboards for permision to use their snoCAD software. Without this I don't think we would be able to run this project. Thanks. www.grafsnowboards.com

c.