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mr love said...
I also wanted to make the board easier to build as I was toying with building it myself( then chickened out)
Hi Martin,
Wise selection.
As a suggestion, to start with you should shape the board yourself & have a 3rd party do the laminating/ finishing work.
Here in N.Z I send an Autocad file for the rocker/ deck profile to the EPS manufacture, there automated hot wire cuts the rocker & deck profile to my perfection. As the cost is relatively small $40, you can't go wrong. The outline & rails need to be shaped by hand which can be done quite easily with out an CNC shaping machine.
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mr love said...
Some of the board maker with milling facilities use a program called Shape 3D. This system cannot read "nurbs" surface which is what most high end CAD systems like Alias that I use produce. Stuart can take my Nurbs surface and convert it to STL which is a mesh file. He can run his cutter paths straight off this. The only down side is that a high density STL file is massive so you don't want to be storing too many.
As a very part time custom board builder, STil away from commercial Surfboard shaping machines & Shape 3D as they are very limited functionality & severely overpriced!
High end "Alias" would be nice to have, but way out of my software budget.
I'm getting great results with Rhino3dm and have sourced CAM software as an Rhino Plugin. My CAM plugin looks very basic at first, after finding a way around Rhino mass of features & a little bit of experimenting I found that the CAM machine paths can easily be manipulated use the drawing commands in Rhino. The machine paths can be closed tightly or losley, what ever you draw will be the machine pathe, with accuracy (0.02mm)with full size shaping of windsurf boards down to highly accurate windsurf speed foils.
Damn its hot here in Auckland, Air Cond on tonight.