nerdy derby track

The students from the DCRL have been building a Nerdy Derby track for the Milwaukee Makerspace. They will be having a race at Milwaukee Maker Fest on October 19th, 2013. Pete Prodoehl is keeping track of progress here. Jon Broadfoot and I worked on modeling the track from the dxf that is provided here. I went ahead and extruded the track and situated it so we could get the track section laid out on a few sheets of wood in Rhino. Jon set all of the curved sections up on one sheet so we could write the program the cutting operations to cut on our large CNC router. I decided that it would be less wasteful if I cut the straight sections of track on the table saw. Chad Bridgewater helped me cut those on the SawStop in Kenilworth's woodshop and then I started laying out the drill holes for connecting the straight sections. I set up the other sheets on the router and started cutting. When I was doing layout in Rhino, I decided to label the track sections with inner "I" and outer "O" labels along with number the track sections. The first CNC operation was to engrave the numbers and letters to assist in assembly later. The second operation was a drilling cycle that located all of the holes for connecting the track section to the four layers that make up the track as well as to connect each track section to each other. The third operation was a profile operation that cut out the track sections. It takes a little less than one sheet of wood to get the curvy sections of one track. I mocked up one of the tracks on the floor in the DCRL. It's crazy long. I'll have to build some support sections so I can get it vertical soon. Then we can test a car.