Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

G'day All,

Bit of a curious question... Has anyone ever done a teardrop design - specifically geared to being cut on a CNC?

My little modified JGRO 4x2' CNC router - has me thinking about a revamp - building a full 5x10 table... Life's a whole lot easier when you slide a sheet of plywood onto the table, Load up a file, then click cut. Took me 5-6 hours to cut my teardrop sides... took all of 5 minutes to resize that same side to fit the build area, export the Gcode, and re-cut it on the router...

And there's a certain - Je ne sais quois - to insert tab A into slot B as a construction methodology... Also means lightening holes, and conduit runs, etc - can be designed into the base design, saving even more manual labour as construction progresses...

Andy

I have thought about this also. I do not have a CNC router, but would love to own one. I believe that you could design something like what you are talking about, sort of like IKEA furniture. If you planned on producing kits to sell I would base the design to fit on a standard trailer that anyone could buy, possibly the 5x8 northern tools trailer.

Dan

Howdy Andy, I used a 5' x 12' CNC setup that a cabinet maker had for my walls and hatch ribs; worked great! Several members are using CNC now for their trailers. Here's a link to one of our members who cut his entire Teardrop out with his CNC!

http://www.tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?t=38473
It's a very cool and innovative build.

If you search for CNC you'll see quite a few ideas.

All the Best,

Dave

I've thought about it. Unfortunately I don't own a large CNC router table. Mine is 10x10 cm and right now only setup for burnishing type polishing.* I'd like a 5 axis water cutter, but I suppose I could survive with a 3 axis router table.

I'm mostly designing for template use for building. Clamp a template to the piece, and run a router around it to do the operation. I'm keeping my designs

* I built the CNC polisher on an xy table from a laser profile meter. It has 0.001 mm positioning accuracy with less than 0.00025mm backlash. Of course most of that is lost on polishing heads that are hundredths of a mm across.

I started hand building trailers to get my mind off CNC machining, now that I'm retired, everyone wants to learn CNC.

I can see it as a big help in large production work, but not in a basic teardrop community that utilizes harbor freight frames and lights. Why not go all the way with CNC and make the molds to form all the components out of UV proof plastics and CNC cut aluminum extrusions and other hardware? Sell the kits as everything from teardrops to tiny houses, we could all be shareholders !

I don't see any reason to kit it... Shipping as usual would kill any cost/time savings.

I do however see a weekender being suddenly a lazy sunday'er

Dunno - do you remember when R/C planes used to come as a set of plans and a bunch of raw sheets and sticks of balsa? Then along came the die cut (crushed) balsa - so you didn't spend an hour cutting each of those 200 wing ribs... Suddenly kit building took 1/10th the time...

Some people enjoy the design, some people enjoy the build - some just wanna go camping

Getting CNC router time these days isn't as hard or expensive as it once was... Even more so now that the hackerspace/makerspace movement seems to have these machines in relative close proximity to much of the population - often available for beer bribery

I built the original JRGO CNC router, and as I was building my trailer I kept thinking man I wish I built a larger machine! For some reason I get great feeling of accomplishment watching a computer controlled machine build something for me.

Fyddler wrote:I built the original JRGO CNC router, and as I was building my trailer I kept thinking man I wish I built a larger machine! For some reason I get great feeling of accomplishment watching a computer controlled machine build something for me.

As I was posting my last post, I was thinking, where can I get relatively precise 20' rails and lead screws... Then I started to think about how can I make one that isn't reliant on the rails being precise.

I've got a theoretical design for a clamp on 2 axis setup (originally intended for a quick/dirty plasma project....

quick/dirty test had a 7'9 x9'8 cut area - not the most accurate... adding a third axis and a rotozip type cutter; works in my head anyway. Probably need to keep the feed rate way down, and accuracy in the cnc world would be meh especially on the z... but still better than most hand cuts...

AndyL wrote:I don't see any reason to kit it... Shipping as usual would kill any cost/time savings.

Oh I wouldn't say it kills it

(Check the link in my signature to see why lol)

I'm working on a large format cnc router, should be able to cut 4x8 sheets.

With that in mind, I've been thinking what I would like to cut on the router.

My first thought was the nano weekender. Then things got busy and I haven't had any more time to design...

But eventually I'd like to do something really exotic.

Like pseudo chip carving on the side...

Mike...

pseudo chip carving?

like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCGucPF3Ho8 ?

Maybe I'm nuts, but my preference would be a no braincell required kit assembly Everything laid out and run, build teardrop by numbers

Then one of these days I'm going to sort out the urethane injected construction methodology

AndyL wrote:pseudo chip carving?

like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCGucPF3Ho8 ?

Maybe I'm nuts, but my preference would be a no braincell required kit assembly Everything laid out and run, build teardrop by numbers

Then one of these days I'm going to sort out the urethane injected construction methodology

That's certainly one option, and definitely a traditional chip carving idea.

I was also thinking about something like this... But I don't know how to do this kind of stuff...

But of course I am not talking about mass production, but rather niche production.

Mike...

Space is always the issue; partly why im playing with the clamp down design... so i dont need a permanent 7x12' table in the shop, tip it up on side or hoist to ceiling to get it out of the way when not in use...

Carving pics is pretty easy - at least in linuuxcnc - image to gcode works pretty nice