What I mean by tedious is machine time and the fact that you have to use a dedicated spoilboard because to carve your way to a bevel at reasonable speed, you’ll want a large radius ballnose bit, and when it gets to the lower part of the bevel, it’ll cut into your spoilboard to a depth of it’s own radius. 1/4" to 3/8" troughs around the perimeter of workpieces are handy locators if you want to use scraps for parts and hold them with 2-face tape, but they also make that spoilboard useless for anything other than being a dedicated spoilboard.
Also, if any parts of a plywood origami project like this one have concave corners, you need to finish them separately with remachining toolpaths on a v bit.
To me, not tedious when working with plywood is a sheet in under 20 minutes. Drop the sheet, run the file, drop the next sheet, run the file. With a 5 axis or a C axis aggregate head with variable angle, programming swarf cuts along simple bevels is not difficult. And you can even put biscuit slots into the edges of beveled work and make assembly much less of a hassle.
I think it is great. I am new to Rhino. I build polyhedron spheres out of plywood, and came across Rhino by accident. I am teaching myself and it is a slow process.
Is it possible Rhino could take a polyhedron object break it down and establish all the miter and bevel angle to actually produce the finished wooden project? If this is a stupid question, please excuse my ignorance…
This may not be too difficult, depending on the shape. I’d create two concentric polyhedra of your desired shape. The radius would be the thickness of the wood you’ll be using. Then explode the shapes and delete the pieces you don’t need for manufacturing. For example, an Icoshedron has 20 equal sized faces. Thus, you only need a single face from the outer and inner polyhedra. Then, build a solid from the the two faces. You can fill in the missing surfaces using a simple planar surface command such as SrfPt. when finished, just Join the six surfaces into a solid. Now all you need to do is mill 20 pieces and glue them together.
Dale….thanks…I am very new to Rhino…this is a little over my head…could I use one of the polyhedra models from the polyhedron plug in? Or from Waterman?
Hi - see the attached file. I created two Icoshedra from the Polyhedron plug-in - one with scale 100 and one with scale 104. You would make the difference between those two to be your material thickness (so in this case 4 mm).
Then extract unique faces of both. In the case of the Icoshedron, there is only 1 unique face per size. Isolate the faces and create surfaces between them - I used EdgeSrf but there are many ways of doing that. In the attached file, I then put the new solid face flat on the XY plane. Icoshedron.3dm (202.3 KB)
-wim
That is unreal, I am teaching myself to make these out of 3/4" plywood. Keeping all the angles and cuts in line is very very hard to do. Using a table saw. Here is a sample of a few pieces put together and hand sanded, then lacquered.
but yeah, still sort of a lot… unless you have a Rotex by any chance?.. I got one last year and those things remove a lot of material very quickly… pretty much like a belt sander except orbital.
