Two Fawns

Two fawns in our backyard yesterday.

Henry started up Rhino, then drew two circles to represent part of his wooden train turntable (the red thing on the desk). Where does he learn this stuff?

This is a test I did for Paul from Bits&Bits. He came by the other day to learn how to run the Taig CNC mill he bought from me. I used one of his .003" radius tip 10 deg. wax profilers.

That pretty much sums up the past weeks. I had a summer cold and was tired and unproductive otherwise. Now my shop is a mess, there's a huge backlog of work and I'm wasting my time blogging.

I did manage to save up a bunch of links for you to peruse:

Copper Work: An Illustrated Text Book for Teachers and Students in the Manual Arts By Augustus Foster Rose

Honest Ed Died. I walked by his store every day on my way to classes at UofT

Even though I won't have time to play it, I preordered the new Combat Mission game.

Ann Coulter is a deadhead.

Wireless is getting under our skin This is some real science fiction!

The Kemp Micromanipulator

Making selected diatom slides

The Imaginary Toolstore

Today's Metal Detecting Finds

Delft University of Technology Ornamatics Programme

The Speedy Stitcher is always useful, you should buy one.

A Few Pictures by Henry and More by Me...

First off, 3 pictures by Henry with his captions:

"My Lego racecar and this guy fixing it. The pipe is sticking up."

"I don't want to write it in because I don't want to give it a name."

"I had to take a picture so people could see what it looks like. Choo-Choo at a station"



Now a few I took:

Max, controlling a red car.

Just cute...

Last Saturday, desperate for a project, I decided to make cottage cheese, or rather paneer, with Henry. It turned out well. This shows the loose curds being strained. We used the above cottage cheese recipe from Good Eats, but only a quarter of the amount, and then pressed it like paneer. It came out well and was enjoyed by all.

Gregg and Kent relaxing on a Thursday night.

Bill about to shoot, I took the picture in hopes of distracting him. He did miss the shot.

Clif grinding an end mill on the tool and cutter grinder.

Gregg made the nested cube project from the latest issue of Digital Machinist. The one on the right shows the cubes before separation.


And now a two more links:



Our HTML earrings showed up in a magazine in Hong Kong.



The Hummus Blog

My Tax Dollars at Work

For the longest time I have been wanting an ergonomic, adjustable chair for my workspace. I never was able to rationalize spending $100-$800 for a real office chair, especially as the lower priced ones are really cheap knockoffs made overseas. Today we stopped off at the OSU surplus sale that they hold every week on campus and I was able to purchase an Office Master BC44(possibly made in the US, or at least engineered here) chair for the princely sum of $5.00, which seemed to be in almost perfect condition (dust aside). When I got it home I realized why they had sold it as surplus, it wouldn't hold any adjustment to the seat and back tilt. A quick perusal of the mechanism showed why:

Lever B loosens the spring tension that clamps together the steel leaves at C. The steel leaves are slotted and are constrained by that rod, allowing the seat to adjust. In my case the seat adjustment was not locking. Tightening nut A by about a half turn completely fixed the problem, allowing the seat to be adjusted when the lever is depressed, and locking when released.
So the University, rather than having a maintenance man adjust the mechanism, sold me a $120.00+ chair for $5.00

The chair in all it's awesome and functional glory. I'm sitting in it now as I type this...

And now, some links I've been saving up for you to peruse:

How To Make a Ring in 19 Steps

Homebrew CNC surface mount PickNPlace machine using a Taig CNC mill

You Tube video of Taig CNC mill turning bushings like a lathe

Autodesk Inventor LT is free for a year

Plans de moteurs simples

Really Cool Mechanical Art

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

A brief discussion on sheetmetal cutting tools, methods and practices

Here's how to build The Illusionist Locket from common craft store items

Need rubber bands?

Potential Energy

Kwik Check Hole Gages. Yes, I have one...

Here's another take on html earrings.

The African Experience in India

Africans in India

Chess Fonts

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.