ACRYLIC CYGNUS
This is my acrylic Cygnus project. Cygnus is a spacecraft made by OrbitalATK that is designed to resupply the ISS with cargo every few months. I wanted to create an accurate model of the spacecraft, but I only had sheets of 3mm acrylic to work with. The design finally converged on an approach that uses slightly curved pieces of acrylic to form a cylindrical shape. The pieces are notched and wedged so that they can all friction fit together without the need for glue.
I don't have many pictures of this project as it has been a work in progress over the past couple of months. The four pictures you see directly below show the final product after having gone through a few design iterations. The model consists of approximately 16 individual pieces and takes about 1 hour to cut on the CNC machine.
I don't have many pictures of this project as it has been a work in progress over the past couple of months. The four pictures you see directly below show the final product after having gone through a few design iterations. The model consists of approximately 16 individual pieces and takes about 1 hour to cut on the CNC machine.
The four images shown below are of an early prototype of this model. This original design relied on stacking slices of 3mm acrylic to form the main structure and as a result, it was heavy on the material usage.
The video you see below is a time lapse of what it looks like on the CNC when cutting one of these models. The actually piece being cut in the video is the Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) which is made up of 6 curved rectangles.
