Routing is still a nightmare, and the only way to counteract it is to sign up for about 4x the amount of time that should be needed to complete any given file. In efforts to highly decrease the time necessary for routing use, I was able to ask Maciej, professor of Digi-fab and highly skilled with the router and materials, to help deal with the plastic and set up the correct files/bits to cut with. The most recent cell was not a cut-and-dry mill session, but rather Mat witnessed one of the fiascos mentioned in a pervious post and watched the bit go the wrong way around the material to produce terrible cuts and ultimately break and ruin part of the material. We were excited when Maciej agreed to help and spent the first portion of the week tweaking the design and setting up the files to be routed.
Much of the time you will be getting a graduate student to help route, and generally it is someone inexperienced, frazzled, timid, or overly ambitious. This is always worrying given the small amount of time given to routing and the large possibility for error as well as the large amount of money spent on the material. This particular Friday we had a grad student named Gretchen who really worked out great and was interested in getting our material routed in a quick and effective way, essentially the group really got lucky getting such a cool person for router help.
We were off to a relatively quick start and Maciej and Wes were able to watch the initial cells being cut and micro-adjust the speed of the bit to get the correct edges for the cells. Each row was routed into the .5" plastic and we were able to get all of our rows routed on Friday. I was incredibly excited that all of the rows were routed because I knew that it would permit us to do more week on the weekend as well as get everyone excited to keep moving on the project.
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