Stainless Steel Door Sills

This was the other part of my numerical controls course.  The door sills was my original plan.  The University of Washington machine shop just received a new waterjet machine and I just had to make something on it.  Unfortunately, since it costs so much to operate and it was new equipment, students weren't allowed to personally operate it.  Since I wouldn't be doing much, I decided to do the aluminum dead pedal in addition to this project.  Without further ado, here are the door sills!

The first step was choosing a good design.  I narrowed it down to the two choices above.  I didn't think the second design matched, so I chose the first one.  This was inspired by some folks on 8thcivic.com.  Thanks guys!

Like the dead pedal logo, I just had to import the image of the lettering and trace over it.  It's not too tedious and doesn't take too much time.  I just made sure everything lined up and it looked as close to the original logo as possible.  Since the 'C' and 'I' are used twice, I could just copy the same ones.

Here is the completed part drawing.  I guess I could have been more creative but I really liked the designs that have been floating around.

The waterjet machine uses a pressured water combined with an abrasive to cut through metal.  Yep, it cuts through even stainless steel.  Its a massive machine that has a very high operating cost, but does an incredible job at doing two-dimensional jobs.  Just look at how beautiful it is!

Check out the detail it can do.  It's very difficult to cut corners this sharp because on a mill, you are restricted to the radius of your drill bit.  And you don't want to go too small of a bit because you might break it.  Also, clamping this down would be very difficult in a mill. For the waterjet, it just sits on its butt in the machine and the nozzle does all the moving.  Niice!!  The guys in the shop were excited to do this since the waterjet was very new when I did this.

One issue with the waterjet is making sure your units and scale is spot on.  I didn't realize my part drawing rescaled it self when I transferred over the file.  Fortunately we did a dry run, which showed my part scale was off.  We made a small one anyway though.  I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it...

Here is the finished product, along with the dead pedal.  More bling!

Here is a before and after picture.  Notice the abundance of bling and badging.  Shiny...