Jan
04

Week 01, 2015 – Simple Instructions…?

  1. Place ball on downward slope.
  2. Give gentle push.
  3. Watch ball roll.
  4. ????
  5. Follow through!

But of course, this is me we’re talking about; it’s never enough to get the ball rolling on just one project at a time… So let’s assume there’s a “Repeat as necessary.” in there somewhere.  It’s the last step in these instructions that’s the hard part for me, as anyone who knows me will tell you.  Not gonna lie.

Nonetheless, here it is, the New Year…again.  What’s going on?  Well, for starters, I’m hip-deep in screenprinting stuff, and approaching where I need to be to start making shirts.  I’m close to doing the CNC conversion on my milling machine…which I really should probably do the page for, as that’s just been a blank space ever since I started this site and that’s kind of sad. (Same with the lathe, for that matter.)  I put some Ability Points into some very interesting items on the Skill Tree…which I’ll go into detail about in a future post.

Right now, I’m mostly checking in, doing a little ‘station identification’, if you get me– no, probably not, you probably don’t know what broadcast television was… –next week I’ll get down to business, as I’ve got shipments of neat-o stuff arriving in the interim. Stay tuned!

Oct
26

Week 43, 2014 – Make Cool Shirts, Phase One

Screenprinting Workspace

My Ryonet DIY Starter Press, bolted to table in the kitchen. With a 20×26″ t-shirt/sign platen, and 20×24″ 156 mesh screen.

Well, I finally got my ass in gear and started working on things. It wasn’t easy. The apartment is still congested, and I can’t get to anything (Seriously, you don’t even want to know what it looked like behind the camera, let alone in any other room.)

Before I give you a tour of the gear, lemme run you through a quick print I did.  This screen didn’t turn out well, it was under-exposed for whatever reason, but since I knew this wasn’t really a ‘keeper’, I mostly did this to buck myself up by doing something productive, as well as to show my mother– who had come by –the process (Not that she didn’t know, both my parents had been making silkscreens long before they’d made me), and finally, to take photos for a montage to use as banners on the MAKE COOL SHIRTS YouTube channel and Twitter account. Read more…

Oct
04

Week 40, 2014 – MAKE COOL…whats?

Hey, welcome back!  I’m still alive somehow!  First bit of news I have to report is that I’m almost to the point where I can begin commercially screenprinting!  Progress has been slow, because I’m still recovering from all the calamities that seem to befall me with alarming regularity. However, I’m close enough that it has warranted a domain purchase!  So, say hello to MAKE COOL SHIRTS!

In keeping with my usual shenanigans, I wanted the name to be tongue-in-cheek, so originally I was going to go with ‘Shirtstorm’. (Because, for starters, I thought the fact that it sounded like ‘shitstorm’ was funny… I am a simple creature.) And the logo would be a tornado of t-shirts… But apparently that name is already in use, so I said to hell with it.  ‘MAKE COOL SHIRTS’, using a t-shirt as the T literally came to me first thing in the morning, and by the end of the day I had the domain, and the domain had a splash-page with the logo.  Looking back now, it seems like the natural extension of this site, given that developing my ability to screenprint to such a degree was a direct result of my need to MAKE COOL THINGS.  :D

Second bit of news besides the fact that I’ve drastically expanded my screenprinting capabilities, is that I bought a sheet metal bending brake from Harbor Freight.  I’m going to detail all the screenprinting stuff in the next post, because I still have one more order coming in that actually serves to really enable my press.  I also haven’t even unboxed the brake yet, it arrived Friday, and it’s still all bagged and slathered in what I’ve come to call ‘slow-boat grease’, as it’s what anything rust-prone and Made In China arrives from Harbor Freight utterly drowned in… So that will have to wait for later, too.  I should note that I got it– and ordered some aluminium from ’80/20 Garage Sale’ on eBay –in preparation for making my own flash-drying unit for curing ink on the shirts, because a heat gun was not cutting it.

Aug
06

Week 32, 2014 – Well, That Escalated Quickly…

In the middle of the night on July 31st, the motherboard in my workstation burst into flames.  Things just sorta went downhill from there… Read more…

Jan
05

Week 01, 2014 – Restatement of Objectives

Happy New Year, everyone!

Yeah, I stopped updating…  Some family trouble and the shuffling around of people and things put the kibosh on my workspaces for a while.  Everything is cluttered to high hell as the apartment is choked with other peoples’ things.  (Not that it was all that orderly before…)

Over the holidays I managed to pick up something cool; a real silkscreening press from Ryonet, thanks to their reduced holiday pricing.  I also picked up a dozen blank shirts in various colors from Amazon when I found a seller that had good Fruit of the Loom t-shirts in a roomy 4XL for $5.90 a piece. (Amazon Prime, even!) Unfortunately, they’ve since upped their prices.

I’ve really been faced with sort of a neverending cavalcade of clustastrophuckery (Catastrophe+Clusterfuck+Fuckery) lately, but I try not to let it get the best of me, and slowly but surely I acquire more of the tools I need to do the things I’m trying to do and hopefully I’ll manage to do them before things get too far out of whack.

Anyway, here’s what I hope to be posting in the coming days, weeks, and months:

  • Review the silkscreening press, including results.
  • Disclosures regarding my heretofore fairly hush-hush drone projects.
Nov
03

Week 44, 2013 – Touch of The Plague

Spent most of the week battling an utterly horrendous chest cold complete with coughing up blood and everything, it was grand.  Still riding the tail-end of it now, with lumps of disgusting goo rattling around in the ol’ pipes, but mostly it’s cleared up.

Couldn’t think of any links or anything to add…maybe later.

Oct
27

Week 43, 2013 – Links and Things

Well, I ordered some more stuff from Harbor Freight…  I took another shot at getting the air compressor, I bought the powder coating system, and picked up some little bins.  The air compressor was on sale for only $99, less than last time, even!  But guess what? They didn’t ship it this time either! Well, this warranted a phonecall.  It turns out that despite being on the frontpage of every flier, and being part of every damned sale every week, it has in fact been DISCONTINUED for several months!  So now I’ve even got a powder coating system I can’t use without an air compressor I don’t have…  (And then my family made the remaining money disappear…they’re really good at that.) It’s always some god damn thing, isn’t it?

Anyway, some of my projects are on hold, but other than that, the lack of visible progress is mostly me being lazy.  Not that I’m completely idle, I’m just not documenting anything I’m doing, which is part of the reason I came up with these status reports.  Though at the moment most of what I’m doing involves putting my ducks in a row…which isn’t terribly interesting anyway.

Let’s see here… My current expenditure priorities for the next couple months are…

  1. Paying for my webhosting… Which I’m not even sure I can do entirely come the first, and it’s already past due.  Gotta email them.
  2. Getting lithographic film, chemicals, and darkroom supplies.
  3. Getting an air compressor.
  4. Getting the extended bed for the lathe. (It sure would be nice.)

My father and I are also both rather interested in joining the ARRL, in case there were any doubt that we are both enormous nerds.  Maybe do that for Christmas, or early in the new year.  I’d really like to get the 100th anniversary version of the 2014 ARRL Handbook.  We’ve got to get out to Burlington to take our license exams though.  I took a practice exam and got everything except questions about specific frequencies.  (So, with no prep at all, I almost got a passing grade.  I shouldn’t have a problem after I actually learn what I need to.)

Some nifty links!

The YouTube channel of John Grimsmo, knifemaker and just fairly awesome guy. Him and his brother make some totally amazing knives using some crazy materials like Titanium for the handles and hardware, and do it all using CNC.

A photo-heavy Home Model Engine Machinist forum thread about a project 1/4 scale V8…  Usually when you see something like that they don’t mean EXACT SCALE REPLICA… But this thing’s a real internal-combustion engine with electronic fuel injection, using an ECU and everything.  He even made his own scale spark plugs.

A very cool robot thing, with an especially impressive neck joint.  Lots of gears.  The video details a bit of the machining process.

A series of videos detailing the design, fabrication, assembly, and test flight, of a very nice carbon fiber quadcopter frame.  The second video (coincidentally enough posted on my birthday) proves an idea I’ve long held; the only truly smart and safe way for the hobbyist to mill or route carbon fiber sheets is if they’re submerged in a shallow water bath to catch the particles.

And last but not least, I learned a new word.

Oct
20

Week 42, 2013 – PCB Process Revisited

So, as some of you know, I’ve had no end to trouble producing printed circuit boards (PCBs); there’s always some damn thing that isn’t quite right…  Toner transfer is always a crapshoot, quality-wise.  And photo-resist is iffy because my laser printer can print good high-density positives, but not negatives, and my CraftRobo can’t cut rubylith fine enough for the kind of PCBs I’m making…

I’m left with two options;  Screen-printing resist to the board. (Since burning screens is a positive image process)  Or! Using lithographic film in an emulsion-to-emulsion contact exposure with my laser printer transparencies to yield perfect high-contrast negative films to expose the dry film laminated photo-resist on the PCBs with.  (I can also use lithographic ‘duplicating film’ to turn so-so positive transparencies into film positives with perfect contrast.)

Right now I’m just waiting on money for supplies.  Like a hundred bucks in chemicals, film, and darkroom stuff.

In the meantime, here’s some YouTube links!

Oct
13

Week 41, 2013 – Digital Readout

A couple years ago I bought a bunch of cheap Chinese digital calipers with the notion of using them to build my own DRO (Digital Readout) for a mill or lathe, or getting one from ShumaTech which now seems quite defunct.  A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon a newer project using an Android device as a DRO, with a simple Arduino hardware interface to some magnetic scales.  The developer has since added support for the Texas Instruments MSP430 Launchpad board, and is in the process of adding support for the cheap Chinese scales and calipers.  I’ll do a full write-up when I build the system.  (I’ll be installing it on the lathe, since the mill will be converted to CNC in the near future.)

He was supposed to release an updated version of the firmware that supports the Chinese calipers the weekend this was originally posted, but it’s been two weeks now, and nothing.  So I think I’m going to have to get back to writing my firmware now that I have my sample voltage shifter chips from TI.

Oct
06

Week 40, 2013 – Shars Tools

I fell a bit behind; I had these posts partially prepared but never posted.  I’m going to try and add at least a couple links and pictures later.

So I made an order from Shars Tools.  Shars is where I’ve gotten the majority of the tooling and instruments for my machine shop.  It’s basically the Made-in-China-dot-com of the machine tool world, and judging from the AOL and gmail mail addresses, I swear it’s run out of somebody’s house, and they don’t actually have any inventory, it just comes direct from China and they send it off to customers…it really wouldn’t surprise me in the least. But their prices are hard to beat, they’ve got one of the best selections, and their customer service is good and very responsive, especially considering it really does seem to be run by like ONE PERSON.

This time I picked up some handy bits and bobs, for instance, a set of telescoping gages, and a direct-reading ‘mechanical digital’ micrometer accurate to 0.0001″.  Very good tools for inspection.

I picked up some new inserts for the indexable tools for my lathe; since I can’t run it fast enough to reach the optimal cutting speeds for carbide inserts on aluminium I’d been meaning to get some aluminium-specific inserts…which are sort of hard to find for some reason.  I also picked up a matching indexable boring bar.  I wanted to get a pair of internal and external indexable threading tools with special thread-forming inserts, but they were like $30 each.  Need to do that though if I’m going to really do any serious fabrication on the lathe.  I also had my eye on this great grooving and profiling tool.  Profiling will be a big deal if I ever convert the lathe for CNC.

Also picked up an indexable dovetail mill for the milling machine.  I figured it didn’t cost that much more than the non-indexable version, so screw it. This way, any time it gets dull, I can just replace the cutting edges instead of buying a new cutter. Inserts are relatively cheap.

Go back to top