Week 50, 2015 – Quick Update… Quick like a Laser!

A blog post, on time?! Is it an illusion, or am I one miracle closer to sainthood?! (Is there an evil equivalent of a saint?)

I still haven’t posted the November Acquisitions– which ought to be a hell of a post considering I spent $2,500+! –nor the December Acquisitions… (Blame Fallout 4; 130 hours in and I haven’t touched the main storyline. great game!) So just bear with me for a moment!

Yesterday I finally got the stupid exhaust duct out of the laser cutter, having long since removed the original bed.  This required that I completely remove the XY table assembly.  I wasn’t too keen on doing this, but it turned out that it couldn’t really go back any way but how it was because of the tight tolerances. One interesting thing of note; the holes in the enclosure’s mounting flanges were properly made as part of its construction…but the ones in the XY assembly were very roughly drilled in the steel U-beams with no cleanup, I really don’t get it.  It’s like the whole XY assembly was handmade and put into an off-the-shelf machine enclosure. The cut-out in the rear beam for the exhaust was rough-hewn with some manner of saw, too. (And not even deburred!) In a perfect world, I would have taken the XY assembly completely out of the machine and cleaned those up, deburred the edges, and so on…but life’s imperfect.

Anyway, now I have to align the mirrors… I needed to do it anyway because I hadn’t after receiving the unit, but now that I’ve taken the whole bloody carriage out and put it back in, I definitely have to do it.  There are some helpful 3D-printable tools for this, which I will link to down below.

After that’s taken care of, I can find the focal point of my laser and that will help me determine how to mount my new honeycomb bed.  I ripped out the shitty old bed which was utterly useless, and now with it and the exhaust duct gone, I can cut/engrave basically the entire space within the XY table area… That’s like 12×14 inches, certainly a fair sight better than the 9×12 the machine is supposed to do*, and it sure makes the 12×12 sheets of birch plywood I picked up more useful.  (*And the work-holding clamp in the stock bed had a capacity of like 2.5×6 inches or something absurd like that, and you only got the 9×12 if you laid something on TOP of that.)

Though, after everything is back to normal, I’m going to want to install my new air-assist head and high-quality 18mm Zinc-Selenium lens… The air assist will aid in cutting by blowing smoke out of the way of the beam, as well as helping to keep stuff from getting deposited on the lens and mirrors. (And blowing out small flare-ups.) The lens is purported to give a 15-20% increase in power over the regular lenses they were selling, and I’m sure those are already a little better than the stock lens.

Doing that will of course require me to readjust the bed height to account for the new lens height and focal length…but such is life.  I don’t want to do all my upgrades at once and then try to figure out why everything’s gone to hell.

Links!

Here’s some helpful links for laser cutter users.

Week 02, 2015 – On The Horizon

2015-01-21 *Sigh* Yes, I’m back-dating these posts because I didn’t want to start the year off badly when the reason I kept being unable to sit down and write them was because I had so much cool stuff going on!!!

For starters, I spotted this in the Adafruit Twitter feed: A DIY PCB ‘printer’ built around the laser pickup out of an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.  Oh man, to have one of those…

Second, I bought some fabulous stuff from Silkscreeningsupplies.com again: Several new colors of ink, a roll of pallet tape, spatulas, ink clean-up cards, and more… Plus I never detailed the items I picked up on Black Friday… And there’s still more ahead, so I’m going to do a couple big Screen Printing posts to cover it all! (Probably the beginning of February.)

That’s about it for now… I’m trying to get the house in order for various things that’re going on…

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.

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.

Week 39, 2013 – Some Projects and Some Links

Projects

I have some interesting airsoft-related projects in mind, but they’re really in the larval stage right now, a little too early to say much about them.  It’ll be cool though.

My mother brought me an interesting find; what turned out to be an antique paintball marker.  A PMI/Sheridan Magnum 68, manufactured in 1988.  Missing a tank, missing a hopper, pretty filthy, but it has what turned out to be an aftermarket— and pretty hot shit —bolt.  I have it in mind to refurbish it beyond new, to fabulous! Clean it up, strip the beat paintjob, replace it with a powdercoat finish, make a new lightweight breach block that incorporates a picatinny rail instead of the old dovetail sight rail, maybe improve the grips…

Someone asked me “Man, why the f#%k does your mom keep giving you weapons?!” because, yeah, this is not the first time.  Recently she brought me a sword cobbled-together by hillbillies that we’ve come to call the ‘Compleat Rural Defendre’ (sic)…pictures to come once I work up a Diablo-style stats screen for it… And before that, she found me this beauty; A pre-1975 Crosman Mark 1 Pellet Gun, IN THE BOX, with an original tin of pellets, and a box of CO2 cartridges.  And I know it’s pre-’75 because in ’75 they removed the pressure adjustment screw and clamped it to a lower projectile velocity, because people were leaving it wide open and then complaining about crappy gas efficiency.

Links

Claudio Grassi’s YouTube channel, primarily chronicling the construction of his 1/6 scale radio-controlled 6×6 truck, with functional hydraulic power steering and air brakes…all handmade! His videos on broaching the planetary gears for his 6-wheel drive powertrain were especially enlightening.

I stumbled upon this thread about a really awesome compressed air V8 that Chuck Fellows machined.  Hella impressive! You should also check out his YouTube channel.

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