I am working on making myself a new fuselage for my hydrofoils. This is going to be a wooden core with some aluminum parts, and covered with a lot of carbon fiber cloth.
The horizontal rod between the two wings is the fuselage.
I sliced the model in half because I want to construct the fuselage in two pieces, so aluminum parts go inside so I can cut and tap holes for screws. I also found that an all wood fuselage just covered in carbon gets crushed by the screws, so the part where the vertical “mast” connects has to be aluminum reinforced.
The thing is, it requires me to cut both sides of the wood, and the model is 1200mm long.
So I cut the model into two pieces, and will be cutting them each separately, but on the same piece of wood. So getting them aligned absolutely perfectly is critical.
I have already leveled the waste board with a 3/4 inch router bit, but I also have to make sure I have everything perfectly aligned on the Y axis, so I cut this bed for the wooden plank. I drilled holes in a 1/4 inch expanded PVC board, and screwed it to the waste board. Then I cut a bed in the PVC 89 mm across and the length of the waste board. The wood is supposed to be 4 inches, but thats lumber yard inches, which comes out to about 3 1/2 inches, or 89 mm. The wood fits very snugly in the bed. I love the precision of the X-Carve.
I use manual control to drill holes in the edges of the board at the X Y zero, and corresponding points to the other four corners of the work area. So that would be [X = 89, Y=0], [X=0, Y=610], [X=89, Y=610]
These holes will allow me to turn the board over, and then move it down exactly 610 mm to cut both sides, and two large areas of the board.
The back end is cutting on the machine now.
