CNC Art

 If you look really closely at the image to the right, you may be able to pick out a few features, or just wonder what in the heck...

This is a composite of the cut jobs for the side wall cores.  The walls are made up of three layers - 1/4" Baltic birch on the outside, 3/4" fir plywood in the middle, and 1/4" Baltic birch on the inside.  Baltic birch is great - better laminations, consistent veneers, no voids.  Fir plywood is, well, plywood.  But it's reasonably solid, straight and inexpensive.  Splurge on the show, cheap on the no-show.

The three cut jobs shown here represent about 10 hours of work on the computer, and will probably take 2 hours of setup/cutting/cleanup.  From some old school boat building I've done, it would probably have taken nearly 40 hours to loft this using an offset table and batten marking, plus another 5-10 hours to cut and then clean up the cuts.  

Now in truth, it's probably a wash to this point.  I've spent an inordinate amount of time learning CAD/CAM, and figuring out some of the 'opportunities for improvement' in FreeCAD.  But the payoff is that now that I *have* figured things out, things like ceiling blocking are a matter of taking a sketch, sectioning a piece of it, and cutting multiple pieces to match.  And since with my design, there's quite a bit of blocking to be done...  That in itself will be a big payoff!

Next up - more CNC fun.  I will try to set up a camera for the whole operation and condense.  Should be interesting.