Manufacturing guy-at-large.

Bed -> AutoCAD

Added on by Spencer Wright.

My bed project is coming along. The Inventor model is done (minus possibly some marginal edits) and I'm now processing it for production.

The way this will work: I buy ~20 sheets of cabinet grade plywood (probably black walnut, from Robert's Plywood) and have it shipped to Old World Moulding. They'll take my part list and cut the pieces up in a big overhead router. The parts will then be finished with a light, clear polyurethane.

In order to make sure that all the pieces have the intended grain orientation, Paul @ Old World asked me to lay them all out in AutoCAD. Which totally makes sense.

Except that I've basically never used AutoCAD. I played with it a bit as a kid (incidentally, it was also on a bed project), but I've only used it in passing as an adult. 

Anyway, I broke it out today and I think the results are passable. It took me a while to get the basics (units, etc) down, but I drew a bunch of 4'x8' rectangles to show the plywood sheet sizes, and then exported each part's face as a DXF and copy/pasted it onto a piece of plywood.

The result: Nineteen sheets should cover us for three full beds. I'm a little disappointed with some of the grain orientations, but it'll be fine. I'm also a bit worried about the nested parts (on the six nearly identical sheets on the left); we'll see what Paul says about that.

The only other thing of note is the red boxes on the right. Those parts have a beveled cut on one side, which needs to be done on a table saw (the router is only 2-axis), so I'm adding a bit of material to the parts.

I'm *hoping* that this shit gets cut this week. It'll be really nice to have a project wrap up :)