We Become an Internet Fad

Well, as an influential artistic poser said, last century, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." This has held true for us, or at least for a pair of our earrings. Last Thursday we started to get many orders for our HTML "Head" Earrings. We had sold a pair or two before, but it became apparent that somewhere on the internet they had been linked to on a high traffic site.

After some sleuthing, we found that they were on the front page of Digg.com. Digg isn't a site I read normally, but is one of those that will bring your site down if you don't have enough bandwidth. The comments about our earrings are hilarious. The post about our earrings has since moved down to the 2nd page of the "7 days" page. Because they were on Digg, they also were linked by many different blogs. Only a few had anything mildly interesting to say, such as these two: Gomeler.com and Clicked. As you can see, I left comments on both, as I did at the end of the Digg posting. Our friend Miss C. also linked to them on Neatorama.

Here I am milling many pairs of the earrings. At this point we only had enough silver to mill earrings for the orders we had, although later that day some more silver showed up from Hoover and Strong.

This is what happens when you work too hard. The mistake on the left is when you use an endmill on a toolpath meant for an engraving tool, and on the right when you set the depth of the engraving tool to .03" rather than .003"

The earrings are somewhat labor intensive to make, in spite of using the CNC mill. I did get into a good workflow with them towards the end of the fad (sold two pairs today, but we can tell the end is near). Now we live in fear of lost packages, returns and all the sundry other hassles that come with people buying items on a whim. It will still probably be worth it. All in all it netted a comparable sum of money as one good day at an outdoor craft market. It certainly is a lesson why Etsy is a good host for our jewelry, had our old jewelry site been linked to, it would have crashed from bandwidth overload in minutes.

So that's what we've been doing the last week, making earrings, mailing earrings and replying to emails.

Henry and Max were great through the whole week, playing peacefully together.

Here they are, waiting for a snack.

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!

Hydraulic Die Forming Experiment

I did an experiment to see if I could make a die, which would blank and form an earring in one pressing, out of 6061 aluminum.

Milling the outline of the die.

The outline is the cutting edge.

The pattern engraved in the die.

Pressing some .01" (30 ga.) copper sheet. There is a rather thick 1/2" slug of 80 durometer rubber beneath. Containing the rubber in a shallow pressure vessel would certainly add to the force of cutting, although I didn't feel at any point that I didn't have enough pressure.

The die was able to cut and form about 5 pairs of earrings until the cutting edges and indeed the forming face of the die started to degrade. So the experiment tells me several things:
1) Steel would be better than aluminum for a die that cuts
2) This will work for one or two pairs of earrings, and certainly for a test of pattern before making a steel die.
3) I need to find some 7000 series aluminum and see if it works better for this than the 6061 that I used. I should also try some brass.

Copper and Sterling 30 ga. earrings

Soon to be on Etsy.