As Lucas and Emily renovate the Alaya, they have had to fabricate many unique or no longer available parts. To rebuild their motorized anchor windlass, new gaskets were needed. Lucas measured and modeled the main and motor seal gaskets he needed and sent the files to me. I imported his files into SketchUp and then into V-Carve Desktop to generate the G code files needed to drive my CNC router. The video below is a CNC simulation from V-Carve.
Lucas drop shipped a couple of rolls of KARROPAK Tan Fiber Sheet gasket material to me. The challenge became figuring out a way to hold the uncoiled sheet flat on the CNC bed. I used a combination of Oramask 813 stencil film and XFasten Double Sided Woodworking Tape as seen in the gallery below.
Two rolls of KARROPAK Tan Fiber Sheet Part No. 3046
Testing Oramask 813 as a release layer between the CNC bed and the XFasten double-sided tape
Full sheet of Oramask 813 over the gasket material
Nearly 100% coverage with XFasten double-sided tape to hold the whole sheet of gasket material as flat as possible
Ready to apply to the pre-prepared carrier board of MDF
Carrier board with offsets for CNC marked out
Gasket material sheet adhered to carrier board of MDF
Carrier board clamped into the locator and the CNC all zeroed out and ready to go
UCCNC software controller with the motor seal G code loaded
First set cut with a 45 degree carbide insert V bit set a little too low and adhesive from the double-sided tape pulled up
The gasket material released nicely from the light adhesive on the Oramask 813
Ready to release the actual gaskets with really thin sections that turned out to be pretty durable
First set of gaskets released and ready for a lot of gentle fuzz removal
Cutting the second set of gaskets with the depth of cut reduced to avoid pulling up adhesive
Second set of gaskets came out much cleaner
Carefully prying up the thin main gasket with a razor knife blade
Two sets of anchor windlass gaskets ready for a test fitting
Heat applied with an old iron seemed to help take the coiled memory out of the gasket material
First test fit on the windlass housing looked pretty good!
The video below shows the first attempt at cutting out a custom gasket on my CNC router. The pass shown was just a little too deep and brought up some adhesive from the double-sided tape I used to hold the gasket material flat. A second try with a little less cutting depth resulted in a cleaner cut with less fuzziness to contend with.
If I were going to do a lot of gaskets on my CNC router, a drag knife and vacuum table would probably be good upgrades!
