No unexpected Museum in a Box work this week. The London HQ are still working on shipping out the orders, but we seem to be past the points where I'm needed.

As things wound down for Christmas the week got filled up with a fair range of CAD and CAM.

For a Christmas present I designed a bird feeder which screws onto an empty cordial bottle, that then becomes the hopper for the bird seed. Finding a matching thread design for the bottle took quite a few iterations, but gave me the chance to level up my FreeCAD skills to learn how to do threads. Plus I found out about the ThreadProfile workbench, which makes it easy to add any of the standard thread profiles, including those for plastic bottles. Annoyingly the bottle I had to use wasn't one of the standards.

The finished design was then 3D printed.

Switching machine, and software stack, there was some more CNC machining of the part designed in Fusion360 that I mentioned last week. This time I stuck my GoPro in the corner of the machine and filmed some of the work:

Back in FreeCAD I started some work with the Sheet Metal workbench. My mountain bike doesn't have a rear mudguard because it's got a pannier rack and the standard options I've had in the past don't really fit well in combination. The rack provides a bit of protection, but I've long been meaning to fabricate something from laser-cut polypropylene. It's a good opportunity to add a new set of CAD skills to my toolbox—the Sheet Metal workbench isn't limited to work with metal, it's good for designing any three-dimensional shapes which can then be unfolded into a net to be cut out of sheet material. More on that when I've got further with the design...