CNC Car Maze

The image I choose

I choose this image, because whenever I would go to Connecticut and see my cousins and grandparents, I would always drive this car. In this photo it's my cousin Teddy and myself in the car. To me it's a childhood car and it's really important to me and that's why I choose to make a maze out of it.

Then I traced and Made walls for it

This was easy, but also hard at the same time. Tracing was the easy part to me. Figuring out how to make the walls was super hard for me to do. I had so many lines and didn't know which line was the right line for me to delete or keep. Then I got help and then was able to figure it out. I also made blocks and openings in my maze so that there would only be one right way to get across the maze. That got pretty easy and was challenging to figure out how I wanted the maze to look and what the path should be.

Fusion 360

In fusion I had so many issues, I'll talk about those later. I had to extrude my maze up so that it looks like this and I have to make sure that there at a certain height so that the acrylic can fit. I had to make sure that there was a correct distance so that the marble can fit. after I did all of that I had to go into the manufacture settings and make it look like a maze so that I can print it. I had not as many issues in the manufacturing part, but not as many issues than I had in the design part of it. I had to create tool paths in my maze so it can cut the material I don't want to create the maze. I had to make sure that the CNC could cut the maze to how I want it. I really was struggling in the part of the process.

Printing the Maze

I had to set up the machine and make sure that everything was at the right setting and that everything was correct. Then I got to turn on the machine and watch it switch settings so that it would grab the right tool. Then after I hit start I could watch it print. I would every few minutes I would go and spray it with air so the wood chips would leave and have a clearer path and the it would be full of wood chips. it was really cool to watch it print.

Making acrylic top with cardboard

This was hard, because the first time I made it, it was way too small and then I tried different things and it made it made it so much smaller. I was going to try to mess with it more in class but I had a study hall and I think I fixed it so that it would fit and not be super small. I just had to take the silhouette from my maze so that the acrylic will fit and look really good. We started with cardboard so we wouldn't wast the material if it didn't work.

Final Product

After, I printed the acrylic I then made sure that it would fit into my maze. I made sure that the marble was in the maze and then I had to force into the maze to make it fit, because it was a little big. I very proud of this maze and super excited to use it in the future.

I am so happy how it turned out, because I had so many challenges and I thought at some points I wouldn't have a maze at the end, because it was taking so long.

In this project we were challenged with creating a maze. We could use any photo we wanted to use and we would turn it into a maze. We had to use adobe Illustrator to create the maze and then once we do that then we had to take it and put it in fusion 360 and then once it looks really good we can print it and we will spry air on it to get rid of the wood chips on it. After it's printed then you make the top for your maze and then you put a marble in it and your all set and it works.
Reflection:
- What went well during this project was using Adobe Illustrator to create part of the maze. For me there were so many issues and challenges I have very few things that went well. Also, using the power tools to cut the maze out of the plywood and sanding it was super easy and was super successful.
- I faced so many challenges I don't even know where to start. In adobe Illustrator I had to many lines at one point during my maze and didn't know which ones to delete and then I got it all figured out and it went super well until I went into Fusion 360 and that's when it went super south. Fusion 360 killed me so much using it and i felt like I wanted to kill it if I knew how or chuck my laptop out the window. Fusion 360 had harsh feelings against me using it and extruding lines would take 1-5min when really it should take 1-5seconds. I had to have the tech people come one day and help me and they had to re-boot my laptop close out of stuff just to open up Fusion 360. I would have to use 3 different laptops somedays to get into Fusion, because sometimes it wouldn't let me access it. I would on average get the spinning wheel of death 1MILLION times a class period. I then eventually had to use Mr. Suter's laptop to get fusion 360 to work and sometimes that wouldn't work. One point I had to go back to Adobe Illustrator and delete all the lines that I didn't need which made it so big. After that you would think oh, you won't have issues, but no I had so many that I started guessing how many times I would have the spin wheel of death. There were so many issues and I absolutely hated Fusion 360 so much that once I printed it I was happy to be done with Fusion but I didn't make my maze deep enough so when the top goes on it doesn't work. SO I have to go back in and fix it and re-print it. There were so many more issues that I can't list all of them, but thee were more issues then I have stated in this. The list keeps going. I faced another challenge with my acrylic, because it was too big at first so I had to sand it down for 2hrs straight and it did nothing. So I had to re print it so that it would work. After, I re printed the acrylic it worked better, but I had to force it into the maze.
- I absolutely do things differently. First, I would maybe do something different so that I wouldn't have as many issues. Second, I would make sure that I have a small file and not a big file so that it take less time to do the job and that I wouldn't have the spinning wheel of death as much. Third, I would make sure that Fusion 360 likes me and that it doesn't take 50 years to do a job. Fourth, I would make sure that my paths were deep enough for the marble to work. I would probably change Fusion 360 so that it would work better. I also, think that using different laptops really helps and makes a difference when using Fusion 360. I think that the more time I spend working on it the better it will be. I also would make sure that my acrylic could fit in my maze with out me forcing it into my maze.

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