I really need to go get some 1/4" plywood to finish the build by cutting and mounting the strut plates but I’ve been working on redoing the rudders on our boat. The goal being to carve the locally available material to make new rudders using 6 lb density foam core material and roughly 28 lb density Gator board (similar to Coosa board).
The carving on some scrap 6 lb density foam looks great with the single flute bit. I started the pocket cuts in a bad spot so the last one is partly off the sheet. The three bands are to test surface finish – the lowest is the smoothest, then it goes up in roughness. The middle band is pretty good for my work so I will probably use that.
I’m making heavy use of AI (ChatGPT) going all the way to emitting GRBL/.nc files for cutting while I get my computer-side toolset figured out and setup. I’m using a MacBook with arm chip – I got a Windows emulator going for Estlcam so likely going that route although I’ll try Fusion with the speed up script. I’m really trying to go to FreeCAD but I have way more experience with Fusion so that is a slow slog somewhat helped by AI. I still find some things in it very difficult but it’s mostly just being used to Fusion (things like adding offset planes at the moment).
A few guys a work have been playing with Claude to do prompt based modeling in Fusion. They are getting some surprisingly good results with the basic assemblies they have been making.
Oh, I forgot to mention I’ve been doing that with FreeCAD and ChatGPT via an MCP (kind of a bridge between the AI and the program that lets it work more efficiently). I’m working on the rudder design with AI and having it draw it in CAD has been a great way to understand what it is doing. I’ve definitely had an occasional issue with what AI has generated on other things so I’m not trusting it blindly but it is very impressive.
The orange is a very high density non-wood sheet product (similar to Coosa, about 28 lb density) and the blue is another sheet product that is used as core material in marine hulls and such (6 lb density foam). Silver is solid stainless steel rod (Nitronic 50 on main 49mm shaft, tangs are 316 – hopefully 316L – they were supposed to be N50 too but diameter might have been too small for the material I sourced).
On a MacBook (arm cpu) with FreeCAD 1.1.3. It’s been stable except it did glitch at one point (crashing FreeCAD). I think the MCP uses some accessibility layer in FreeCAD and that was having problems. So it tried another way and it’s been working so far. Not sure if it was able to turn it (the accessibility path) back on at some point.
I see there is a recent update so I’ll try installing the newest one.
