Parametric System 2: Meandering Weirdness

Objectives

  1. Design a parametric system for generating 2D/3D patterns suitable for cnc milling or 3d printing.
  2. Fabricate instances your design using a a 3d printing process or cnc milling process.

Parametric System

I started with something I’ve been working on for a while…my meandering line algo. For those of you just joining me, this algorithm populates a space with random points and then draws a squiggly line through them by finding the nearest point with the largest y value. See below post if you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Meandering Squiggles

However, this only gives us a line. I experimented with a number of ways of making this line more suitable for 3d fabrication, including turning it into a vector, extruding and capping it, making a second line that varied its width, exporting it as an illustrator file, cleaning it up and then extruding it…and so on and so forth.

However, I ultimately ended up going a different direction, and took my initial meandering line, moved it vertically on the y-axis at random height intervals, and then swept a strange shape that was a concave curve on the left and a convex curve on the right. The result was the utterly strange form that looks like a pile of goop or frosting. It was perfect.

Complete Grasshopper Definition.

FYI the below images are recreations of the process, and don’t reflect the final form exactly.

  • Wandering Dots
  • Def for the random y movement.
  • The new line at random y values
  • Lofted.
  • Curve creation in Rhino.
  • Curve + top and bottom rails.
  • Resulting Shape
Actual final shape!!! Ready for fabrication.

Process

  • Setting up the stock shape in Fusion.
  • First pass cut with 1/8″ FEM, using adaptive removat
  • Second pass cut with 1/16 ball end mill, working in a modified radial pattern.
  • Third pass cut with 1/16″ ball mill, using parallel tool path for final smoothing.

After a couple of crashes, I finally got the hang of the fusion CAM tool, and had my tool paths. Note to anyone working with a Bantam mill: their tool library is lovely, however, you still need to adjust the max cut depth for most tool paths. For millable wax, it was 3mm.

After that, I threw everything into Bantam and was ready to mill, but the cut time of the final pass was much too long, especially after fighting with this thing for a full day already. (more on that later).

  • Ensuring correct stock placement.
  • First pass.
  • Second pass.
  • Final pass. 3hrs…too long unfortunately.

Milling in action

Could watch this all day

Finished Product

Learnings/Failures

Bantam + Aluminum = NOPE. 0.05mm depth per pass means simple operations take hours.