Project Details
[Return to Previous Page]CNC Control Interface and Automation for Slab Leveling Jig
Company: Creative Persistence LLC d/b/a Seneca Woodworking 1
Major(s):
Primary: EE
Secondary: IE
Optional: CMPEN, ME
Non-Disclosure Agreement: NO
Intellectual Property: NO
Seneca Woodworking is a startup that designs and manufactures precision woodworking tools and markets them worldwide through our ecommerce store and an international retailer network. This project will help us create a unique new product offering that we will bring to market. In recent years wood furniture made from “slabs,” or large rough-cut slices of a log, have become increasingly popular as finished furniture one can buy from a furniture store but also as custom commissioned installs, and as projects for woodworking hobbyists. Making these types of pieces involves cutting a wood log with a bandsaw into large slabs, then taking those rough-cut slabs and flattening or leveling both sides to increase smoothness, uniformity, and parallelism between the two largest flat sides. Large production furniture shops will do this flattening on equipment that costs five or six figures like a large planer or a CNC router. Hobbyists and smaller shops will do this using a “slab flattening sled” which is a manually operated jig that usually consists of an X-Y gantry rail system like that of a CNC router except without any of the CNC motion control electronics. In this type of a system the jig holds a standard woodworking handheld router perpendicular to the workpiece while the user manually moves it in both the X and Y axes to surface the slab with a large fly cutter or surfacing tool. This kind of jig is a much lower cost way to accomplish flattening of a slab without buying a CNC router, but it requires a significant amount of manual work. Many of these types of jigs available commercially are low cost and have serious shortcomings in functionality. In trying to resolve this, a manually operated jig was prototyped for us that improves on some of these shortcomings. The scope of this project is to create an automation component that could be sold as an optional accessory and added on to this jig when the customer’s budget or production needs make adding automation to their workflow a strategic choice. While the task of slab flattening can be done with a CNC router, some users are intimidated by the CAM programming aspect of owning a CNC router, and would prefer a simpler, purpose-built tool for the job. We propose that it’s possible to design a controller that can be installed on the flattening jig and used to drive X and Y axis movement automatically with a minimal amount of input parameters on a user-friendly interface. For example, by entering the cutter diameter and total travel distance in the X and Y directions. More advanced parameters like federate adjustments and cutter flute count could be available in an advanced menu, but keeping this interface simple would hopefully lower cost and make the technology more accessible to people that don’t need more advanced CNC capabilities The main deliverable for this project would be a microcontroller with user interface that is capable of driving servos or steppers to control two axis movement of the slab flattening jig. The stretch goal would be to make mechanical modifications to the current prototype and attach the system allowing it to function.
