Our goats live in a small hut, and this time of year it’s chilly. This summer we had “upgraded” their door to have a screen on it of heavy gauge steel screen to allow it to be cooler. However as it got colder I made a window to go over the screen (which luckily was around the size of a sheet of thick clear acrylic.
Window of thick clear acrylic
However as a bigger problem was the hut door didn’t seal (not sure why it was so off when it was built but had an almost 2" gap around the opening, letting in a lot of cold breeze. So I wanted to extend the door, and wanted it black, so thick black acrylic seemed like a perfect material. So how to make the drawing to get the sizes (since my default way of drawing anything is CAD, I took a photo with a measuring tape in it (as above) and brought the photo into Fusion360 (while I normally use OnShape, I prefer Fusion’s canvas scaling for some reason) and traced the shape onto the door photo above. This gave me a nice model for the acrylic. I then cut the screw holes into the acrylic. For those unfamiliar to how to use a scaled photo in Fusion (or OnShape) you import the image into a “canvas” then you “calibrate” the canvas by picking 2 points with a known size and it will autoscale your image to “true scale”. Now in Fusion you need to first create a component, activate it and then import the canvas with that component selected or you can’t calibrate it. Yes of course in a photo like this there is parallax but seriously this isn’t aerospace.
(Image to scale)
The biggest challenge with the CAD model was that that door is way bigger than the Glowforge, so had to figure out how to cut it into components that could fit, and there is the bolt on the door. So cut it in several places (then used gorilla tape on the back to hold the pieces in place while I screwed it in)
Fixed
Complications:
Now somebody (Butterscotch) decided to come over to “help” and he “helped” by biting me on my carotid artery. And for anyone who says “yeah, but goats don’t have top teeth so it’s OK”, well sure but they can still bite a 1/4" branch in half and their bite is about as strong as a binder clip. So yeah, that hurt…
(not sure my colleagues in vascular surgery would believe this…)