Since I was a little kid in elementary school I dreamed about designing a building an RC car from scratch. Unfortunately I never had the equipment or skill necessary to do so, until now. I am finishing my final year of technical training to be a high school shop teacher and finally have the equipment and basic training to build a car. I am taking a CAD / CAM (Autocad and Mastercam) class where we have to design things and cut them out on a CNC machine.

I told myself I wasn't going to do an epic project but here I am after 200 -300 hours on Autocad and countless hours agonizing over the tool paths in Mastercam, I have finally started cutting out my parts for an 1/8th buggy of my own design. Last Thursday (April 14/2011) I finally cut our my aluminium parts. They are rough and still need to be finished (filed and wet sanded). And I still have the delrin arms to cut out as well as the wood vacuum mold for the body.

Here are a couple of pictures of my progress:

Picture of the alu sheet in the CNC machine. Coolant is flying everywhere so you can't see much!


CNC Machining done. The blue color is layout ink, this will be cleaned off later.


Chassis with flashing removed and a quick file run over the surfaces.


All the pieces removed from the sheet. Lots of flashing to still remove. This is because I didn't set my cut depth low enough....oops. And the bit I was using (1/8th flat end mill) was VERY DULL.


Later in the evening I was doing a little mock-up.




Should have some more pictures up soon.