Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Wood & Metal Business Card Case”.
Welcome back to the workshop as a maker, i’ve always felt it was important to have a business card case that i designed myself as sort of a statement of intent of who i am and what i do. I’Ve had a couple of designs before and they were all pretty bad or kind of flimsy. So i designed this incredibly overbuilt one. I like the way it feels in my hand – and i love the mechanism and the look of the wood and metal together and i’d like to show you how i made it.
I designed the case entirely in fusion 360., so we’re going to be spending a bunch of time looking at that software, but don’t worry, you’ll see some handwork towards the end of the video. To finish the case, i really love this software. There’S a lot to learn and i’m barely a novice with it, but it’s one of those tools that feels like i shouldn’t be allowed to use it like.
I can make anything, that’s a really addictive feeling, and it’s probably worth mentioning. That’S just my personal feeling on this software autodesk isn’t involved with this video in any way, i’m using a plugin to generate this voronoi pattern on the top and bottom plates. I’M starting to see these designs show up everywhere. I guess that’s not too surprising! They have. This really cool look to them and you can save a ton of weight without sacrificing strength of the material. There’S something mathematically significant about it too, but i’m not really able to grasp what it is.
Despite reading a few articles about it anyhow, the plugin is a little goofy. You can find it in the create menu, even though it generates a sketch. It only generates the pattern at the origin only on the xy plane, and it only takes dimensions in centimeters. On the plus side, you can define whether you want curved or straight line shapes, and you could dial in the ratio of shape size to the rest of the design. Once we have our voronoi pattern, we’ll go back into our sketch to further design this plate. We need to pull a few offsets off of this rectangle and then round off the outside corners with the fillet next we’ll sketch out the line where we separate the body plate from the lid pull a few offsets from this line.
There 1 16 inches apart. Now we use the trim tool to actually define our design from all these overlapping lines. Don’T worry.
If you make a mistake, you can get your lines back with a quick undo. We should end up with two distinct shapes starting to take form, even though they’re right next to each other, i’m using the two tangent circle tool to create the roundover for this corner and then place in a hole where the hinge bit will go next drew both Of these parts to a thickness of 1 16 inch, making sure that i’m creating two separate bodies instead of a single joined one. The bottom plates are then designed as a complete repeat of this process.
The only difference is the random output of the voronoi pattern. Then i move the plates down 2.56 inches, so they’re in their actual positions. Now we need to design the mid-frame. This sketch is much simpler, but it’s based on the lines that are used for the top and bottom plates.
These parts are just a simple border frame in two pieces. One side has a hole from the hinge pin and the other side is rounded over to allow the cap to pivot freely. I want the case to use some magnets to stay shut, so i’ve cut out some small pockets to accept them all the cam instructions for the cnc are also created in fusion 360.. I won’t go into detail here that really deserves its own video.
The holes for the voronoi pattern are all pocket cuts and the outlines are contour cuts, pretty simple: 2d operations, really the aluminum is cut. Using this carbide, 1 8 inch, two flute spiral up cut bit. The helix shape helps with chip ejection to keep the bit cool. I’M just using my shop back to blow the chips clear for the pocket operations, i’m using a 20 inches per minute feed rate and a 0.02 inch depth of cut with the helical ramped entry for the contour cuts.
I’M sewing down to 15 inches per minute and a 0.01 inch depth of cut the material is fairly thin. So even with these shallow cuts, the run time isn’t too long for the wood. I’M changing to this two flute straight cut bit. So i get clean edges on both the top and bottom.
I’Ve increased my feed rate to 40 inches per minute and my depth of cut to 0.04 inches, i’m also plunging straight into the material. I don’t like the finish. The helical ramps leave on wood with the cnc work done. I use a dremel to cut the aluminum pieces out from their tabs.
I clean up the edges with a file before finishing the surfaces with a random orbit sample. I start the assembly by gluing the magnets into the frame and then gluing the cap piece together with epoxy. While waiting for that to cure, i cut a short length of 1 8 inch steel rod to use as the hinge pin. I put it through the hole in the cap and use it to align the bottom plate in the body once that’s set, i glue the top plate together.
Finally, once the epoxy is cured, i use the anvil of my bench vise to peen the hinge pin into a rivet. The last thing i do is use a file to finish the outer edges, making sure the wood and metal edges are flush to each other. Rounding. The corners and making sure the two halves mate smoothly when closed and that’s it, the hinge will likely be pretty stiff at the start, but continue working at it and it should loosen up nicely. The design is a little bulkier than i’d like. I wanted to make sure there was enough wood around the pin, so it wouldn’t break easily.
I also haven’t found a finish that i really love to use with the bamboo plywood. If you have any suggestions, i’d love to hear them. So what do you think? I know cnc projects aren’t always the most popular, but after i posted this to instagram, i had a ton of people asking for a video, but hopefully you found something useful in the design portion of the video, and i promise i’ll be following up with how to Set up cam in fusion 360., thanks for watching we’ll see you in the next article you .