Heres a pic of the Denver team with our latest prototype of the Colorado Top Bar v6.1 at the Maker Lab in Denver Colorado (check out the video below). Please leave your pics and stories below!

From left: Aaron Makaruk, Tristan Copley Smith, Patrick Beseda

Heres the video!

First Warre at The Maker Lab in Denver

The Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project http://bees.gatech.edu
built an opensourcebeehives top bar hive for the 2014 Maker Faire Atlanta.

Here is a photo https://www.flickr.com/photos/64305656@N00/15455063686/

Sorry this has taken so long to get to. Here's some of the finished photos.

There was one hive that we were unable to assemble due to the warping of the plywood. The weather and the plywood itself leads me to consider using solid wood, perhaps pine boards and acrylic for our final cuts. Otherwise the ones that came out were very nice! The three that we were able to use are ready for bees. We will take some more pictures after we order some more bees and get them settled in. The last pictures of the tall hive I was playing with using a exterior latex paint which make it difficult for the pieces to come together, so after some mistakes I finished the rest with linseed oil. A lesson learned. Now I know what works I can move forward and order some more to be cut. Overall I'm happy and I think the bees will be happy too!

Here's my first Warre, the cutting and assembly went very smooth. I had to include the leftovers picture to show how efficient the Warre design is. The last photo illustrates how small a package it all is 18" X 24" X 12" and about 40lbs using a quality marine grade plywood.

Here's the CTB on my first run. I ran at 60 ipm with a 3/8" bit (I have switched to a 1/4" bit with 1/2" shank). It's amazing how fast you can make a hive and how well the design fits together. I used a low grade plywood on this one thinking I would scrap something and I was sorry I did, it came out great!

Awesome @marcob8890 thanks for sharing these and glad they came together so well for you! We'd love to see some more pics when you have the hives placed in their new home environments!

Also, would be great to see you + your team in the photo!

Great Marco, could you share the type of wood you used? And how long did it take to cut out the wood? Thanks! I am honna cut my first one this week and would love to have some benchmark

I used 3/4" marine plywood that was close to 19mm thick. I had some problems with 1/4" shank bits. I like to use 1/4" cutters to reduce the sawdust. I tried using a 1/4" cutter with a 1/4" shank and broke or shook loose 4 of them. The only way I could keep one running was to reduce my cut speed to 30ipm. I am now using a 1/4" cutter with a 1/2" shank made by Whiteside (p/n 1058) with great success. I organize the cuts by part , group several parts, and make gcode files for each group. It takes a little longer this way but it allows me to make adjustments if needed. When I get comfortable with the individual files I'll run the whole sheet in one file. My default cut speed is 60ipm with a 3 1/2hp, 22,000rpm router. I am testing the upper limit as I go and I think I'll be able to settle around 90ipm.
The CTB takes me about 1 1/2 hours and eventually I hope to get that down to under an hour. The Warre is between 2-3 hours with a goal of under 2 hours. Both cut times include time to change files. The designs are both well engineered and complete. I've run 6 so far and I'm still awestruck at how well thought out they are. The only change I made was to add rabbits for the acrylic windows on the Warre.
I use a Makita 3/8" mini belt sander for cleanup(what little is needed). It's small enough to get into the mortise cuts and eats up end grain.

I hope this helps, please feel free to contact me if you need any help.

Good luck with your first cut!

About my machine:
I built my machine from a kit sold by www.cncrouterparts.com. It has nema 34 motors and a rack and pinion system, heavy duty for a kit machine. It cost me about $7k to get a functional 9' x 5' machine that I'm happy with. It's a good way to go if you can afford the sweat equity. It was a fair amount of work and if I was to do it again I would buy the prewired electronics box.

I thought it would be nice to have some models to take to events where full size hives would be out of place. I did this one at 1/10th scale on a 3d printer. The top is removable and the internal parts installed. It's probably too small and fragile for a lot of handling. My next step will be to scale it to 1/8" plywood and cut it on a laser.

Hey There,

If you send us the file you made, we'll put it on the OSBH github repo.

Thanks!
aaron@opensourcebeeives.net

aaron@opensourcebeeives.net

Where should I post them to? I have both the .stl and .gcode files I can send. The .stl files are large (12meg zipped) for emailing, but I'll try. I also have the full size gcode files for Mach3 and native files for Cut2d/VCarvePro if anyone is interested.

I think there might be an email next to my name somewhere - I'll throw them up to Github

Here's the finished product. I took the nested file and scaled it in Rhino to 1/6 scale. I then exported as a .dxf and imported into Corel Draw (Epilog Lasers uses Corel as it's post processor). I used a laser friendly plywood from Laser Bits, Birch plywood requires so much power that the wood gets fried in the process! I had to sand a bit to get the fit right but all together it only took about an hour to make it. I used a Dremel with a router attachment to rout the dados and then I assembled it without glue just like the full size version. I will probably end up gluing some parts because it will be handled so much.
I hope nobody minds the plug for this website.
This will make a great tool for explaining how a hive works and I will be modeling the Warre to show the differences between designs.

This is AWESOME! Excellent work @marcob8890 - I just shared it on our Facebook page. Could you place the scaled down files in our Community Github Repo?

Please be sure to share pics / files for the scaled down Warré when it's ready

@marcob8890 email me at aaron@opensourcebeehives.net and i'll put it up on github

Just finished the Warre at 1/5 scale. Used the same process.

And now for some full size hives. That's my first CTB with the new rev., worked great! The residents arrive May1st so I need to get back to work......

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