Raygun XIII.I

The worst of the CAD is done:

That's the right side of the main body. About all I have left is putting the screw holes in the mating piece, finishing the "energy cell" release on the bottom of the grip, and doing a last pass to add slop and tolerance where possible. Pity many of the cuts are not at right angles; makes it hard to do clean-up with traditional machining.

And I may still add an overlap for visual effect.

I'm liking Fusion 360 more and more. Once you get used to the program flow, it moves very quickly. Shapes -- primitives or what they call "sketch" shapes -- snap to existing edges and faces making it really simple to line up near-seamless additions or cuts. Faces are intelligent; you can drag them around and they remember what they were trying to do based on the geometry they were originally a part of. For instance, if I were to select one face of the sounding board and drag it, it would re-fit itself to the inner curve of the body shell as I dragged it. Within reason, of course!

And the CAM section is very complete, with lots of choices in path and work setup. I may actually CAM from Fusion, instead of from Cut3d. And just in case that wasn't enough, they also throw in a pretty decent ray-trace render!

So why is the piece above so complicated?

Because almost all of the components fit into it. This is the keel of the gun; all the parts screw down to it so I can finish and test the electronics before closing the other half of the body over it all. And, yes, there's rather a lot of compromise here. The surface transducer, especially, is facing a 1/16" aluminium panel that is split in two pieces to allow the gun to come apart. I have no idea how it is going to sound.

The Cree also lacks the heat sink I wanted to add; it is nested on the face side (meaning I'll have to protect the wires) instead of making contact with bare metal. And as I said there's barely room for even the wiring between the parts.

And there's way too many screws that need tapping (not in the model; the screws holding the switch down, pegging the spring, and as part of the pivot for the trigger.)

Since the CAM software will attempt to cut everything that is presented in the file, I'm leaving the screw holes out (except for the large holes the heads sink into). So if I go with 3d printing I'll need to fork the file or duplicate the parts that need screw holes printed into them. And I might make another pass for holes, with a bit change or two, but I'm going to be pushing just to get a full piece run off on the Tormach before each day's reservation runs out.