My Latest Dies, and Ring Mandrel Mk2.

I settled on a 5/8" sterling disc for my latest jewelry stampings.

These are stamped with the Kanji (Chinese character, used in Japanese) for water, "mizu".

As always these earrings are available on Etsy...

See my mistake? The one in the center would have made a backwards "om". A quick flip and I milled the correct die cavity on the right...I do this more often than I admit...

A bunch of dies, biohazard, celtic knot, om, pi and mizu. Milled into 6061 aluminum. A very quick way of making new earrings.

A blurry closeup of the celtic die and the stamping.

My new Mk2 ring mandrel. I decided that chucking it in the 4 jaw would allow me to dial it in when mounted on the rotary table so that any engraving/milling would be true to the periphery of the ring.

The parts, conical washers and a split, shouldered, bushing (this one is size 8)

The conical washers force the bushing to expand when the screw is tightened. I have plans for the Mk1 Taig version here.

Cute and Trees

Well, I've been remiss in posting pics of the kids lately.

Max, looking cute, with his hands in a standard man position.

Max being thoughful and poetic.

Who is that up in the cherry tree?

It's Henry!

Climbing the fir tree beside the house.

Going higher!

Then he got to a point where he didn't want to come down and didn't want to go up. Felice finally had to climb up and get him, and he said he didn't want to ever climb a tree again. I asked him later if that was true and he said that he would climb a tree again.

Some links:

This is some electronic music by one of my customers, spacey stuff...

Buy me this clock.

Les Schwab died, he was a great businessman. Free Beef!

Chris sent me a link to this somewhat dangerous looking lamp made of swarf.

Linn Gear in Perspective, glad to see they have a sense of humour.

Circle Sector, Segment, Chord and Arc Calculator

Wedding Band Size Estimator.

George's Rifle

George brought his rifle to open shop the other night.

George shows it to Steve.

The rifle.

It's a Martini action made by BSA. Besides that, he used an octagonal barrel that was already rifled. Everything else? He made from scratch. He reamed the chamber for .357 mag.

The barrel was octagonal for it's whole length, and he didn't have a large enough lathe so he hand filed it tapered and round for 3/4 of it's length. The octagonal ferrules were cold forged and filed to shape. The wood is wonderful.

He milled and filed the lever and the trigger guard to shape, as well as the cap on the buttstock.

He canted the buttstock so it fit his cheek. The scope is some high precision german make, notice that it is free floating.

He completely stripped and cleaned the action, as well as making a new firing pin. The old one was the wrong size for the rechambered action. He chambered it for 357 mag.

The hingeplate on the butt.

It opens.

Out comes a machined holder for 5 .357 mag rounds.

The screw that retains the action to the rifle was milled so he can use a .357 case to unscrew it.

Back to Normal

Ok, I'll take a break from the technical posts.

Henry invented the shortest lightsaber ever. It's an M&M's plastic tube jammed on the end of an LED flashlight.

Max, somewhat messy and wearing two different boots, on the wrong feet.

I'm not sure Henry is close enough to the TV.

One of my new customers is BrickArms, they make aftermarket weapons for Lego Minifigs.

Create Character with Acid Etching by another one of my customers.

Our Friends Rick and Heather finally have a web page up for their wooden boxes and rattles.

A cool expanding mandel design, with a cool name: Xpandrel

A Pi Ring

Today I finally got around to making a ring engraved with Pi around the periphery.
The ring I machined (see the previous post on machining a stainless steel ring) had an outside diameter of .984", thus a circumference of 3.091". The text was laid out in the direction of the y-axis, for conversion to rotary coordinates by Bobcad. The width of the ring was .284"

This yielded 331 lines of G code that looked like this:
N160 G00 X0.1176 Z0.1 A328.7806
N170 G00 X0.1116 Z0.1 A326.9334
N180 G01 X0.1116 Z-0.0015 A326.9334
N190 G01 X0.1201 Z-0.0015 A323.8664
N200 G01 X0.1071 Z-0.0015 A320.4074

The 4th axis set up, with a diamond drag bit in the spindle.

Engraving the ring, .0015" deep.

Photographing the ring was hard, and I'm not happy with the results.

The "3" came out too angular as well - A axis moves cannot use arcs, only straight lines, and I oversimplified the curve to polyline conversion. Live and learn. We'll see if it sells on Etsy.

Yet Another Experiment in Hydraulic Die Forming

Sick of my hydraulic die forming posts yet?

Thanks to a post on the Bonny Doon forum, I changed the die program to have a "moat" or channel rather than just the die standing proud. 1/8" wide and .1" deep.

The channel worked! Cut the piece and formed it perfectly.

There is a lot of waste with this method, although silver is quite recyclable.

The silver cut smoothly, copper had those breaks around the radii. I should figure out something to do with those silver pieces...

Inspired, and infused with hubris, I decided to try a large die for a barrette
Same width and depth of channel.

A row of cheerful skulls, .02" deep inset into the die surface.

Well, I'd be lying if I said it went smoothly. Turns out I don't have enough 80 durometer rubber on hand, so I had to press half the die and then the other half using the rubber I did have. MSC will make some more money soon, although I should probably shop around for a good price, as I suspect I'll be buying a bunch to support this venture.

The only real flaw is that the eye sockets and nose sockets were sharp, and cut through the 30 ga. copper. I'll have to smooth the die a bit, radiusing the edges of the skulls. The dimples are for holes that will affix it to the barrette with rivets. But that will have to wait for the next attempt!