Framing around bulkheads is painful. It is hard to get everything straight and aligned. I found the Shopbot to be very helpful. There are three problems I was trying to solve: (1) Getting multiple corners straight across 30 feet, (2) nearly no time and (3) basic pine wood framing would sag over a 28″ run.
In fairness, the cuts did take a lot of time (about 2.5 hours of cutting), but I could do other work while the ShopBot milled out the pieces. I also had several hours of prep and installation, so I’m definitely slower than a skilled carpenter would be, but probably faster off by using this solution. Plus, I think I’m definitely more straight and accurate. I especially need this, because my lack of skill means that I don’t have the bag of tricks available to deal with non-straight surfaces.
First, Autodesk Revit makes drawing ducts easy as part of an overall project model. The problem was the way the ducts were situated, the team working on the basement couldn’t simply make a frame that went all the way to the wall, because of an annoying placed door.
I was able to make a quick drawing in the model and print out frames on the shopbot. They only had to be aligned vertically which was easy to do with the help of a laser level.
These were easy to cut out while I also had to make some parts for my daughters school project.
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