Re: Dinosaur skeleton, and other models, DXF files.
Hi all,
I don't know if others here are as anal about symmetry when building things as I am, but I recently worked on a picket fence and was trying to work out how to easily and evenly space them all out, while still being able to pack them out slightly if I needed to. I know when I see a fence and the gaps vary from 5mm to 15mm it just looks horrible.
I came up with these which I'm calling Fence Dogs, for obvious reasons, they sit nicely on the rails and can be slid along and won't fall off. So you can line up all the pickets and space them before screwing them in.
To hold all the pickets inline, just have a piece of wood as long as one of the rails tied loosely at the ends to support the pickets just enough so you can slip them in and adjust where required.
I've attached 3 lots of DXF's, to suit 35mm, 38mm, and 45-50mm rails, each on a 400mm x 600mm x 12.7 MDF sheet, using a 4mm endmill, but a 3.2mm or even a 5mm will work fine. They are spaced enough so there are no little parts that will fly off during cutting to stuff things up. But use plastic, metal, whatever.
I've allowed for 8mm wide screws to hold them down when machining, so the drill cycle is first, screw them all down, and then cut them out. Bit tedious I know, but better to spend 5 minutes with a cordless screwdriver than breaking cutters I reckon. And the hole in the head section also makes a nice grab point if their wedged in tight when fitting the pickets.
Hope others may find them useful for not only fences but maybe other things. The free app 7-zip can open rar files, as the DXF's were too big to upload.
cheers, Ian
It's rumoured that everytime someone buys a TB6560 based board, an engineer cries!