A Bit of Muscle

The first stop on our journey is a wedding in Phoenix, so it’s a date that can’t be pushed back. There is no way we’ll have the van ready in time, so we’ve been feverishly working to be just ready enough.

We were progressing slowly and steadily, until things took a sharp turn south for John last night. He was working with the metal sheeting on the side of the van when his drill bit snapped in half, throwing him off-balance and causing the remaining portion of the bit to drive an inch or so into his leg. When he removed it, there were pieces of hair, skin, and muscle on the bit (a bit of muscle… get it?).

After a short bout of shock and a lot of rest (and a bunch of jokes about how he now knows what it feels like to get stabbed), John is back on his feet, although in a fair amount of pain. It seems that he got pretty lucky (at least compared to other puncture wounds in the leg), because it didn’t seem to hit an artery, nerve, or tendon, and his muscle is still connected. Now we’re just staying hopeful that it doesn’t get infected or cause any long-term problems.

In less traumatic news, I joined TechShop and took the ShopBot class. I am proud to say that on day one, I successfully built our kitchen unit with the help of a robot. I was going to make a joke about how for once, the robot wasn’t John, but now that feels tasteless coming off his injury.

Cutting out the pieces using the ShopBot. You can see slip-up in the front left corner.

Anyhow, the ShopBot is a CNC machine used to mill materials, with wood being the most common application. A three-hour class taught me how to operate the machine using a pre-built file. Most of the people in the class had already taken a separate class on how to create these files. Naturally, I decided to teach myself and optimistically reserved the machine for only a few hours later. Somehow, in those few short hours, I successfully managed to convert the detailed cad files John had already created onto a 2D plane and figured out how to define each cut using VCarve Pro and export them into a format the ShopBot understands (*dusts off shoulder*).

Thinking I had things mastered, I ran the machine, only to have the bit immediately plow down across the middle of my plywood. Turns out the program was expecting the Z axis to be measured from the top of the plywood, while I measured it fro the bottom. Whoops. With that fixed, the rest of the process went smoothly, with the only hiccup being that I had to recut a number of pieces because I didn’t cut all the way through. Since I already had all the vectors defined, this simply required me to adjust the cut depth and re-export.

Now we have a completed kitchen unit, and one less day to complete everything else.

John assembling the kitchen unit.