CNC Mill Butterfly Box

Toolpath simulation for the bottom half of the box

For this Design for Fabrication project, we were tasked to work with a partner to design a treasure box that would be fabricated on the CNC mill. My partner and I wanted to prioritize the following:

Using as much of the original material as possible.
Making an aesthetically pleasing shape that could be cut in a reasonable time.
Having a way for the top and bottom to connect.

In addition to these things we also wanted to keep the walls relatively thick to avoid deflection in post-processing in the mill which is discussed further down.

Final Product vs CAD Rendering

The final product came out very close to my CAD renderings. The only difference is in the base. The CNC Mill did an extra pass at the top of the box. We aren’t sure where in the g-code this mistake was made.

Real base

Rendered base

Real top (before milling)

Rendered top

Tool-pathing in Fusion360

Tool-pathing was much easier than I expected it to be. We set up the bounding box of the material in Fusion360 and used the 3D Adaptive tool-path tool to create g-code for the CNC. This was a relatively easy process. We did have some issues getting the software to cut around the outside of the design all the way but were able to resolve those by selecting the top and bottom curves when setting up the cut.

Base tool-pathing

Top tool-pathing

Finishing Techniques

After the pieces are taken off of the mill there is still material attached that needs to be taken off using a hand-controlled mill. My partner and I were not mill trained so we had help from a Bray Labs staff member to take the excess material off of the bottom piece.

Overall, everything went well in this project. I am proud of my partner and I’s ability to produce something that looks good when we had never used to tool before. I enjoyed learning how to use Fusion360 and how to tool-path in general. I think that learning to write g-code by hand before doing this project was also beneficial because it made the generated g-code easier to understand.

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