CNC Stomp Pad 2 - CNC Design- CNC Video Tutorial - CNC Videos

CNC Stomp Pad 2 - CNC Design- CNC Video Tutorial - CNC Videos

Video Info:
In this next video we go over the design of the CNC Stomp Pad. We use Adobe Illustrator to sketch it out. We prepare something that a CNC Plasma Cutter could follow.

Video Tutorial:
We are in Adobe Illustrator right now and this is where we're going to do the design of our stomp pad. My buddy had a couple ideas so I had him pull up some images from the Internet, tell me about it a little bit and talk it over so and here's what I pulled up.

I believe it is an alum cover. For the stomp pad he's thinking something like the outline of this image in some way shape or form. You'll notice when you go into CNC plasma cutting you will lose a fair amount of detail that the plasma does takes out of it. So you can't make a highly design. You also have to think about where are these holes going to be drilled later for the spikes. Is it going to be everywhere or is it out on these flimsy edges or is it going to be a central to the piece.

Really what we want to get to is something that looks a little bit more like line art. He also found this one as well or more line art and it has a fair amount of detail as well and a lot of that will be taken out. You would look a little bit more like this as you are going around with your plasma cutter you can cut out this design is relatively easily.

Let me get to work here. What we are going to need to do with this design is create some lines that look like that line art piece. In illustrator if you are not familiar with it, you need to use the pen tool to start making the outline. I won’t do all of this for you because it will actually take a fair amount of time but I'll go ahead and do some of it just to give you an idea. We're going to zoom in a little closer on this so you can really see it. Sometimes as well I go ahead and to make some changes to the different colors of lines. You’ll notice right now the lines are white and black let me flip flop that. This not necessarily a tutorial on illustrator but you'll see some of it in action. What I'm trying to do is head around this design and really do the outline of it more than anything to start with. We are taking little bites as we go, nothing to major. I will zoom in for little detail to show I am clipping off control handles as we go. What this is and what we’re doing is creating the line that the CNC plasma cutter is going to follow.

We are really going from a raster image to a vector image. Raster is a pixel image and vector is a line image. Let me stop for a second here and go ahead and change the stroke of it. Let me bump it up to see that line a little thicker, a little thicker and a little thicker over here you can really see it start to stand out. Let me go off line here I'll finish the rest of this design so as not to bore you with it.

We are back. I went through this design, simplified it and took a lot of stuff out of it to get down to the bare essentials. This is very similar to designing a logo. If we take a look at it here, these are the lines the plasma cutter is going to follow when we do this.

So we'll do inside cuts here and all interior cuts here. So now that we have the design, we will flip over to CAD. We will go to RhinoCAD. We will change it into a DXF file and do a few other things. See over there.