Part 2: The Best Miter Station – CAD and Shop Work
In my last blog post I discussed a bit about my miter station design ideas. I finished up a video where I discuss some of the overall CAD design concepts and how I did a few things. The most novel thing I did in the design was to use “Configurations” for the drawer to have various different sizes. This is very efficient from a modelling standpoint, as it is just one instance replicated multiple times; that means there is less data for the application to have to keep track of, which can make modeling and rendering a bit faster.
It also allowed me to design the drawer slide pilot holes into the drawer component by creating a “plug” the size and depth of the pilot hole. This was incredibly powerful, as it allowed me to reposition and move the drawers around until I found the optimal sizes and arrangement. Then I could just do a “Combine” with the alignment hole “plug” to virtually cut them out from the plywood sides at the precise right location. Then the CNC could drill them out, and everything would fit perfectly!
In practice this concept worked great. Initially I thought I’d have to do a lot of two-sided drilling operations on each plywood center piece, as the piece required holes on both sides. But, I realized, by accident, that I could just drill all the way through the piece to get to the other side, and that would work fine for a pilot hole. This meant I could do a one-sided operation, and save the flipping, re-alignment, and running the next operation.
While I did cut everything out on the CNC, I also realize a lot of these cuts are easy to do on the tablesaw, or with a track saw. But I like the idea of not having to measure anything, and all the mortise and tenon joints just fit together like legos.
Like I mentioned in the last pos, all the CAD files are available as a free download: Digital Files: Miter Station CAD and CAM
