Getting a Custom CNC Part Is Easy These Days | Voltlog #441

High quality PCB Services https://pcbway.com Join me in this video where we take a closer look at how I designed a custom matte black anodized aluminium holder which I then ordered through the CNC machining service from pcbway.com.

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#CNC #Machining #Fusion360

This won’t be exactly an electronics video as you are used to seeing on my channel but nonetheless I think it’s an important topic that even as an electronics engineer you will come across sooner or later if you are building a project. At some point you’re going to need maybe a custom enclosure or a custom front panel or a custom holder for some sensor and you may decide you want that made on a CNC machine.

And this used to be quite an expensive deal, it used to take a long time to get something like this manufactured, it just wasn’t feasible for hobby level. Hence why people started doing PCB FR4 front panels for their enclosures a while ago. But that is no longer the case these days with companies like PCBWay.com which is the official sponsor of the voltlog youtube channel. If you go on their website, you will find the CNC and 3D printing tab where you just get all of this wonderful options for manufacturing, you get CNC, you get 3D printing in all of the available technologies, you get sheet metal fabrication, injection molding, laser cutting you name it and all of these are accessible in 1 off quantity with affordable pricing.

So I wanted to give this a try and show you guys how easy it is to get something like this manufactured these days. In my case I did not have an electronics related job but mostly a home improvement kind of thing, so you’ll probably laugh at this use case, but I have this couch in my living room, which has these thin metal stands, and I have a nice wooden floor and I noticed the couch stands started leaving imprints in my nice wooden floor. So this was a cosmetic issue with leaving those nasty imprints but also a functional one because the couch just slides around on the wooden floor. It’s just bad design, I don’t know why they designed it that way. The contact surface is just so thin that you can’t even attach some of those special rubber protection things.

So I decided to fix this and I started by getting exact measurements of the feet with my calipers I then sketched those measurements in Fusion 360 and started designing this holder where the couch feet would sit on a larger surface. This was a fairly simple design that I got done in a matter of minutes. Once I was happy with the result I exported this as a step file and and i uploaded the resulting file on PCBWAY.com. I went for CNC manufacturing, as a material I selected Aluminium 7075 and I opted for an Anodized black finish not because it was needed for any specific reason but just because I wanted to give it a try. And I opted to get 5 pieces manufactured. Based on these settings I got a total of $157 USD which is not bad considering this is a custom CNC part, machined out of a material that I specifically picked Aluminium 7075 and then anodized.

It took a few weeks and I finally received my custom parts, nicely packaged and here they are. Nicely looking with that black anodization finish, manufactured exactly based on my design. Now while these new parts will spread the weight of the couch over a much wider area preventing the indents in the floor surface, this is still a very smooth surface one that will slide around. So to prevent that from happening I purchased this adhesive rubber material, this is 2mm thick, 30mm wide and 50cm long strip which was like $4 a piece or something like that. I would say that 2mm is too thick for this purpose, 1mm would have been just perfect. So Now I’m adding this rubber backing on the aluminium support piece which will prevent it from sliding around on the wooden floor. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icMxJbcXls