Somehow I knew it was Industrial Design. I had to take a few of those classes getting my Industrial Eng. degree. My school had a full Eng. Dept so we had our own buildings and equipment but the Design folks were in the Art Dept. I found the safety in that dept to be quite different than that in the Eng. dept as in almost none existant. Not knowing the level of experience the students have with machine equipment in general its hard to tell what your strategy should be. Do you use manual mills already, anyone know how to read g-code to even know where a problem might exist etc? For starters I would suggest the 2 or 3 most qualified, technical people work on the machine helping each other to learn/understand everything. You will need someone that knows whats what to setup the machine and the workpiece safely everytime, if you have a lot of people with no real business knowledge wise trying to program and cut a long 3D program your going to have problems. One incorrect tool length setup or typo and that could be all she wrote.
Seems like your into this project so maybe your the one that needs to step up and take full control from the start to being the operator of the machine. In a school type setting its best to have one or two people to check others code and setup their piece in the machine to cut for them while teaching them what they are doing. This way you avoid having someone clueless trying to run the machine as most of the students will surely be if they have no prior experience with anything. Sounds like one person can cost all of you use of the CNC so might as well have one person responsible heh.  |