I was wondering if anybody could point me in the direction of how to cad and make a file so I can have my Delrin laser cut and any other steps I need for it.
We use a trotec laser engraver. My team has always used Fusion, but that doesn’t matter. You need to always design the piece with exact measurements — including the holes for screws. Next, we give the piece a thickness of 0.06 inches. After exporting the file as an stl, we move over to Autodesk inventor and import the file in. Make sure that it is scaled correctly and export that as an SVG. This has always been compatible with our software.
You can do this in onshape, or if you are in a time crunch, tinkercad. On both, start with a basic shape and try and sculpt the piece you want out of the block, usually importing things like c channels to guide your sculpting.
Laser cutting a cheaper material than delrin like cardboard before you finalise your design is a good step.
Yes, make sure you have test parts to align things to and iterate before cutting the final version. Also, just open up onshape and start a sketch, then create your part, extrude the sketch 1/16 of an inch, then export the part’s face into a dxf file format, sometimes you will need to convert to a svg file so make sure to get something like inkscape to do that, online converters don’t work too well. The holes on vex parts are usually 12.7mm apart from each other, and I found 4.3mm works well for screw holes. Hope this helps!