Cyclekart progress, 2011-06-19: plasma cut steering wheel core
Cyclekart progress 2011-06-19: plasma cut steering wheel core.
I put the OpenSCAD program which generates the .dxf file for the plasma cutter up on github:
cyclekart_steering_wheel.scad
And here it is after the plasma cutter did it’s magic on a slab of aluminum:
It took all of about a minute for the machine to cut that thing out.
Scary Reasoner 
Wow! Thats really cool. What are you planning to use for the grip? I think some polished wood would be great, but really hard to do. JC
Wood is the plan. I have to re-do this metal part though. I designed it with a scale of mm in mind, and I think the machine’s software thinks 1mm == 1 inch, because at first my drawing was *huge*. So, within that software, we took a hole that we knew was 1/4th inch, and scaled the drawing down so that the hole was 1/4th inch, but the scaling operation was done sort of by eyeball, so it didn’t come out quite right (the splined piece that bolts onto the steering wheel to allow it to be attached to the column doesn’t line up with the bolt holes.) So I need to figure out what’s going on with the scaling and adjust my original drawing (which is trivial to do, once I know what the scaling factor is.)
Also the aluminum looks nice, but the piece is maybe a tad too thin. It would work, but a thicker piece would be nice. Originally, I was going to use steel, but the aluminum certainly does look better than I could ever get the steel to look.