Making Earrings on the CNC mill

I went on a creative jag this week, playing with fabricating earrings on the CNC mill

Milling a piece of aluminum flat to adhere the silver sheet to.

24 ga. (.019") sterling silver sheet. I use 3M carpet tape to adhere the silver to the aluminum, after cleaning both surfaces with rubbing alcohol.

Milling a pair of earrings. I first used a 60 degree engraving cutter to do the text, then a 1/32" endmill to drill and profile the earrings.

The earrings stayed in position and strongly adhered to the carpet tape, I had to use WD-40 to unstick them from the aluminum

The finished earrings (on sale on Etsy)

Milling a pair of steampunk-ish gear earrings (gearrings). In spite of the cutouts the carpet tape still held well.

The finished earrings.

The omma earrings took a bit of doing, two online dictionaries, a brief lesson in hangul typography and a bit of CAD magic. I tried out a diamond drag engraving tool for this time, which you use with the spindle off. I think I prefer the results to the 60 degree engraving bit.

Korean Hangul Omma (mom) earrings.

I also did a pair of emoticon smiley earrings and I'm working on a few more designs. It's pretty addictive and fun to be playing with textual jewelry.

Just a Few More Pictures of the Rose Engine Turning

I thought I'd add a few more pictures of my experiments.

Diminishing straight rosette

Spiralled rosette. The toolbit was too high above center in my opinion. 4 degree spiral.

A better spiral, 2 degrees and a finer pattern with less depth of cut, tool tip slightly below center.

Engine Turning and Boxed Children

The other night I was watching "John Ratzenberger's Made in America" and a segment came on about the RGM Watch Company. The segment showed them using a rose engine to do "engine turning" on various watch parts. I looked them up on the interweb and they had a lovely page about their engine turning. Inspired by the examples, I did some thinking and set up a rough approximation on my CNC mill.

The first pattern I produced in a piece of brass.

Although the pattern looks deep, it is just a series of grooves in the face of the work. The light ends up reflecting in lovely patterns when you move it around.

The basic rig. A tiny round nose lathe tool is clamped to the z axis of the mill, and the work is rotated in the 4th axis.

In action the y axis moves the work side to side, and the rotary 4th axis, um..., rotates. The x axis is used to retract and engage the tool, and the z axis sets the tool height. Relative to the tool tip, the work looks like it is rotating while wobbling back and forth
Here's the code that generated the pattern:
G91
M98 P1000 L25
M30

O1000
G01 Y.02
G01 X-.005 F10
M98 P1234 L20
G01 X.005
M99

O1234
G01 Y-.1A9
G01 Y.1A9
M99

That code took some serious head scratching. I haven't used nested subroutines (M98,M99) before, and I was happy they were so easy to implement in Mach (the control program I use on the mill).
This site has more information on engine turning which was of great use to me, I also relied on my well worn copy of Holtzapffel's The Principles and Practice of Ornamental or Complex Turning to grasp the finer points of the process.

Here are the instructions for building your own (non-CNC) rose engine, should you have nothing better to do.

Now on to children in boxes:

Henry isn't sure that the mail is the best way to travel.
Max and Eben share a box.

Ok, that whole box thing was tenuous as I only had those two pictures.

Here Henry shows his love for the cat.

Pizza beckons, but I thought I would close by saying that I am extremely excited about the upcoming production of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" .

Finally, The Important Things...

Well I can finally get back to important stuff like blogging about how cute the kids are. I really wanted to blog earlier but I have been working without rest (cue violins).

Max shows me his butchered chocolate Santa. Probably second to the easter Bunny to being a horrific item to consume. More about chocolate Santa below...

Henry looks out the vinyl window of his huge playhouse, courtesy of Aunt Betsy.

Max the buckethead, pets a horse on a geta.

Henry practices his karate (I took out a video, "Karate for Kids" at the library). Notice the playhouse in the middle of dismantling.

Max shows off the new blue marker he got for Christmas.

Max in a TV coma, Henry as a mountain lion.

Awww. Cute...

Max and Henry play together (!) with yet another Thomas set.

I look alert, don't I?

Max shows off his Kung Fu.

So anyway, getting back to the chocolate Santa...Henry was eating his in the kitchen and I asked him for a bite - he trots over to the computer and gives me the bottom 1/5. I pop it in my mouth and immediately am disgusted. Felice is laughing hysterically in the kitchen because Henry was using the bottom of the Santa as a spoon for his chicken noodle soup. So I had Santa chicken noodle soup in my mouth. Bearing in mind that I am a) a vegetarian and b) not accustomed to mixing sweet and savory tastes, or the textures of chocolate and chicken, you can see how this was a less than desirable gustatory mix...

As Felice noted on her blog, we had quite a storm before Christmas, which left us without power for 3 days. In the course of reading up on generators and such I came across this site about survival (not survivalism). It's interesting reading. We really need a small generator for the fridge (TV, light, computer...) Reading email on my ancient laptop via dialup was not satisfactory. In terms of survival we had plenty of lights and candles, the woodstove heated us dependably (although splitting wood for 3 days used some muscles that had atrophied, thus pain) and the Coleman stove was adequate.

I started research into the repeating crossbow, as I thought it would be in interesting project - when if ever I have time. Through that I came across this site about Chinese siege engines.
Will I ever do any fun projects? Oh and this led to me finding Canadian made siege engine kits...

I had planned on linking to this site about St. Nicholas before Christmas, but I didn't get the time...

The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections is now online...like you didn't already know that...

Who knew that there was a tablelegs.com?

Here's a good blog about the Korean pop world.

I caught an odd movie on TCM, "It's Trad Dad!". It introduced me to both the surreal non-antics of the Temperance Seven, and the unbelievably deep voice (and beehive hairdo) of Helen Shapiro.

The Dapra website has tons of interesting machining products and some good tech info...

So now that I have vomited out all of these links, what lies ahead for the New Year?
Well my immediate to-do list has the following entries:

1) Update Web Pages
2) Pay 4th quarter estimated taxes
3) Get a SSN for Max (need the deduction!)
4) Make more business cards
5) replace a part for an Atlas turret tailstock and ship to a friend.
6) Perform an inventory of Taig items in stock
7) clean shop.
8) Blog

Hey, #8 is done!

Happy New Year!

PS) I should list what else I've done today
1) modelled an elastomer spring in Rhino for a my guy in MA.
2) reamed holes in 5 timing pullies for a customer in TX.
3) packaged up items to send to customers in Canada
4) emailed 500000 people (or so it seemed) in response to questions

Snow, Birthday and Now Sickness

Well it's been a fun few weeks.

Henry plays with lego.

Felice, Henry and Max enjoy the snow. It snowed about 2 inches, and lasted about a day.

Max's first snowball.

Henry turned 4, Max helped blow out the candles. We had a bunch of kids over who ran around like maniacs.

Max enjoys chocolate cake.

Nebiy has a levitating hat.

Now we all have colds, except Henry. Felice has the worst of it as she is working all her weekends at the Holiday market, and I have it nominally better taking care of the kids. Max does not like being sick and has been unpleasant about it - think a sick terrible twos and you get the idea. We think everyone may be on the mend now, although the end is not yet in sight.

The snow was wonderful, it is rare for snow to come so early and it fell in the middle of the week which worked out schedule-wise for us. The boys built a snowman (a somewhat dirty and leaf encrusted snowman) and I had fun pelting Henry with snowballs.

Henry's party was a success, and we now have even more toys underfoot.

Hugh Putnam, who ran the summer camp (South Pond Cabins) I went to as a child, has died and I found his obituary interesting. He was the kind of guy who always made you feel lazy, as he was always working hard chopping wood and doing chores.

For some reason I was surprised to learn that Leslie Charteris , author of the Saint, was 1/2 chinese, enough that the Chinese exclusion act applied to him when he tried to get US residence.

For you WW2 buffs, the Defense of Britain project.

South Bend lathe history.

Kinematic Models for Design Library

David laserscanner, open source 3D laser scanning. I need to get a laser now.

More Photographic Genius

Henry asked to come along to Kent's weekly open shop night a couple of weeks ago, and took some pictures, captions, as always, by Henry:

"Kent, he has a shop."

"George, I like him."

"It's a big thing."

"Shoes."

"You!"

"A big machine. Kent is hiding."

"It's wood."

"Kent, his cup."


We're fully in Holiday Market mode now, Felice will be out working from early in the morning until around 7:30 every night over this long weekend and I'll be going nuts with the boys. Saturday there is the local train club's open house, so I can get a hernia lifting Max up to see the trains. It is a great layout though.

I am organizing all of the Legos now, because we have so many that it gets frustrating for all of us trying to find pieces to build anything. I'm not sure how I'll sort them out, but if I can at least separate out all the non-brick parts (windows, wheels, people) it will be a lot easier. I'm hoping it will pay off over the weekend and get Henry involved in some fun building.

I bought the The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide and have pretty much read it cover to cover. It's a great primer in Lego technique and planning your buildings (in the sense of things one builds, not buildings per se) I'm hoping to force Felice into reaidng it as she has to spend as much time as I do with the Legos, and she suffers from not having played with them as a child.

As I sort the bricks out, I am constantly using the Brick Separator, a little known tool that will protect your fingernails, teeth and sanity when disassembling Legos. You really need a pair of them (I think I have 6, but because of the huge amount of unsorted Lego, I don't know for certain).

Here is a novel use for an Ipod, from the local paper

Medieval Technology and American History has some fun projects.

Korean Folk Tales read in Korean or English

Midwest Snips, I rarely see their tools in tool catalogs, but they have a number of unique and well made tools (ok, mostly snips).

"The South Bend Lathe Story, What Can We Learn from an ESOP Failure", the new lathe I bought was built during the period described and has a tag on it that says "An Employee Owned Company"

The Nietzsche Family Circus (via Siris) If you like Philosophy Humour...

My cousin Caleb's blog on Kumamoto Buddhist activity during Japan's Pacific War

Belated Blogging

Well several weeks have passed since my last post. I can't believe that a lazy guy (me) can be so busy. We're working on getting ready for the Holiday Market, I've been stamping out earrings in the hydraulic press for the last few weeks, now I need to punch little holes for the ear wires, and do the finishing. My business keeps on going and I seem to spend a lot of time answering emailed questions in the morning. My 3D modelling work is on a short hiatus, the last few weeks I spent modelling the mechanism to a clicker type ballpoint pen (why? I can't tell you). Do you know how that mechanism works? I do, now.

Henry at the Davis Family Farm pumpkin patch, trying to pick a good pumpkin.

Henry jumping off of the hay castle.

Max amazes himself in front of the corn maze.

Felice, Henry, Max, Nebiy, Yodit and Adam all had a good time.

Max before bedtime.

Henry emphatically drills some holes

Henry shepherds the Alpha Rex robot.

Henry mocks the Alpha Rex.

The Lego NXT robot system is a lot of fun. It's not really intended for (almost) 4 year olds but that's not to say we don't have fun building them together. It's a good way to learn numbers ("I need a beam with 7 holes, Henry") and it might teach patience. Programming will have to wait for Henry to learn to read and write.

If you are thinking of buying it for Christmas, I would say to go for it, but it definitely requires adult input. We've built two of the 4 robots that have instructions, and I have learned how to use the Labview derived software.

The Good:
Pretty good instructions, programming is fairly easy, great group of users and lots of online sources. Technics lego construction is hybrid of regular Lego and Erector set-like construction. Lots of parts come with the kit (but having more Technic parts makes it more fun). You can build fairly complex robots that do cool things. Using the software will guarantee your child can get a job doing electro-mechanical engineering.

The Bad:
Cables are too stiff and too long (there are now aftermarket cables), leading to a messy robot. All but the first robot only have instructions in the software interface, so you have to build it near your (WinXP) computer. The "coolest" robot, the "Alpha Rex", really just shuffles along like the victim of a stroke, and isn't nearly as useful as the basic "Tribot" that you build first.

Overall it is probably one of the coolest toys ever.

In other news, my homepage got hacked on Monday, or rather the earthlink server did. I had it back up immediately (no word from Earthlink though...a customer clued me in) but I did disappear from Google for a few days which gave me several ulcers. I'm back to the same position in searches again, so I guess everything is fine. Darn kids.

Finally, our old friends Stefano and Kathleen now have a webpage up for their espresso machine repair business. If I had an espresso machine (I don't, I use a french press) I'd definitely trust them to take care of it.

More pictures taken by Henry to appear soon...and some more pictures of my new lathe, which is fully in place and able to make chips.