Finishing a chemiwood/prolab prototype

[Guest akgraphics]

Hiya, I'm about to export my CAD files to the CNC milling machine at school, (then wait a couple of days for it to finish cutting! sigh) and I was wondering, when it is complete, how do i visually finish the material?

 

(one of my teachers calls the material Prolab, our technician calls it Chemiwood ...its a brown, dense material)

 

We've only just got the 3-axis milling machine, and this new material (whatever its called), so no-one in the design department really knows how to finish it yet. The tutors said they'd look into it, I thought I'd get one step ahead of the game and see what you guys think!

[Guest ScD]

Use the couple of days machine time (btw, what are you making which is going to take so much time?) to experiment with another block.

 

Its probably some form of ciba-tool: quite dense, very regular with almost no grain, can be cut with a knife, holds edges beautifully etc. Finishing it will depend on the path resolution of the CNC. I guess if it’s talking such a long time, you have the paths set quite close, in which case some fine grit sand paper and some small blocks of shaped PE foam would be your best bet.

 

Really you need to experiment!

[Guest Stratiegery01]

hey hey. A substance called Ren Foam is very popular for CNC machines. Also look into #10 density Jiffy Foam.