equipment – Twisted and Delusional

Let’s make our own CMM….

Yup, this big arm is nice. I’ve got the power section working again, now I need to see how the rest of the electronics are working.

But…… this arm is too big for doing smaller pieces on my bench top. So I want to use the lessons learned so far to make my own. I have the Langmuir MR-1 cnc to make my aluminum parts, and I can buy carbon fiber tubes. Most of the hard work will be making sure there isn’t any slop in the joints.

This is the MR-1 cnc in the shop…

Gantry style 3 axis with tool measurement and touch probe. I’m really happy with this machine.

I started laying out the structures for the joints. I’m using encoders and carbon tubes available from Amazon. Who knows, someones else may want to build one and specialty suppliers are no fun.

Rhino 3D, the only CAD program I like to use. I have experience in Solid Works, Sketchup, Fusion 360. Rhino is the only one you buy and use, no subscriptions. Used Rhino4 for years up till a few months ago. Upgraded to Rhino8 commercial for less than a year of Fusion.

As you can see, picked up some nice looking carbon tube and started cutting pieces. Watch for future updates, when its running I will make a parts list. Maybe make a couple arms to sell if there are people wanting them.

I’m back again……. I think….

Ok, it’s been a while since my last post again. I may make a separate post with all the details, all the changes, jobs, experiences, ect. But it isn’t this post. This post is about an arm…..

This is a CMM arm, or a coordinate measurement machine. This arm is incomplete and broke, but that has never stopped me from making useful tools from unloved parts piles. The purpose of this arm is that you fix the base firmly in space (like to a table where it won’t move), and you use the other end to probe an objects shape.

This is the end the probe goes in, I’m gonna have to build one. This arm is so old you can’t get parts for it unless you luck out on Ebay or some other online antique shop. Once you have the probe up against the object you want to measure, press the button. This will cause the software (don’t have that either, lol) to measure the angle of al the joints in the arm and create a data point in 3D space using the fixed base as the reference point. Move the probe to another spot on the object to be measure and press the button. Doing this repeatedly creates a Point Cloud that is a digital outline of the object that can be used in modern CAD software. It’s a very useful tool to digitize large parts like the missing pieces of my various projects. If there is a left side part on my project, but I am missing the right side, I can digitize the side I have, and then mirror it in software and have one of my machines make the missing part.

So why but a broken arm missing pieces with no software? Because these arms new go for tens of thousands of dollars. Used arms go for multiple thousands of dollars. This arm was a couple hundred dollars, with a bunch of metal bits I don’t have to machine from raw stock, and expensive encoders that measure the angles in the joints for accurate point data. Bonus is the arm has carbon fiber tubes that make the machine accurate in almost any temperature or humidity level. So……

I pulled it apart to see how bad it is.

Not gonna lie, it’s a mixed bag. On the bright side it’s a known major manufacturer, using good hardware, so that’s a win. On the down side, it’s going to need some major work. I applied power to the unit and checked voltages. It should use 12VDC in, which is knocked down to 10VDC using a LM33T, followed by a 78M05 to give me 5VDC. The 10VDC and 5VDC test pads are showing the full 12VDC. The whole arm is getting unregulated voltage that may have wiped out sensitive components elsewhere in the arm electronics.

First things first, have to get my voltage under control. So I will be replacing the LM338, the 78M05, and any other item I find out of spec in the power regulation section. Once I have done that, I will continue posting the progress on this. I may also make a smaller arm from scratch using the ideas I see in this arm for inspiration. It will have much simpler electronics though……

Adding another machine to the shop…..

I do a lot of work on antiques and custom projects, so a lot of times I need to either produce or reproduce parts made of plastic. My go to technique has always been casting resins, but many times they don’t have the ‘feel’ of plastic parts even if they look the part. Sometimes there just is nothing like an injected plastic part.

I started work on a David Gingery style home made plastic injector a couple years ago, but I was never happy with the way the ram was designed. I purchased a nice electronic PID temp controller for the project, and temp control was never an issue, but there were enough other issues with it that I never put it into use.

Last week I saw this pop up on ebay…..

Hmmmm, a $2500-3000 injection unit that had been torn open and no one knew if it was working. The seller was asking a price that would put it on my doorstep for around $200. After looking at the pics, I figured that the ram and chamber were were professional made, the lever linkages would have proper geometry, there was a neat little filler for the plastic feed, and as a bonus there was a mold hold down clamp. Those were all things missing in my home made unit. If the only thing wrong with it is the temp control, then this would be a good purchase so I bought it.

It showed up on my doorstep a couple days ago and I didn’t waste any time tearing it down to see what I had received for my money.

I stripped the heat guards off of it to see what was left under the covers. Turns out that nothing in the heater and injection parts had been touched, things are looking positive!

Here is all the temp wiring as I received it. Everything looks good, I couldn’t see anything obvious wrong with it. I did notice that it is an older type mechanical temp control which are prone to temperature fluctuations, I decided to replace it with my digital PID controller. The data plate on the back said it’s a 220V unit, I will rebuild it as 110v since I will be rewiring everything anyway.

During the tear down to get to the heating cartridges I noticed a few things that the professional unit had that the home brew didn’t, like this bevel on the ram to make feeding pellets easier.

Another lucky bit were the heating cartridges used in the machine. They wired two 110v heaters in series to make a 220v unit. I could just rewire them parallel to make the 110v unit if they were still working. I decided to test them since I had them out of the machine. I put them on a large steel plate as a heat sink, wired them to my digital controller, and tested the system I wanted to install on the bench.

Everything worked. The heaters got hot, and the controller turned them on and off. The next thing to do was modify the heating chamber to install the temp sensor that feed information back to the temp controller.

In the upper center of the picture is the heating chamber and heat cartridges, in the middle is the temp sensor I need to install. I chose to drill out and tap the small hole towards the bottom of the heating chamber where the original heat probe was located.

Hole drilled and tapped. Temp sensor installed. Time to reassemble.

Reassembled with the new parts in it. I hadn’t put the heat shroud back on yet since I wanted to do a test of everything. The test went well, I brought it up to 131’C which is a good temp to begin melting polypropylene plastic for injection.

Since the digital sensor will let me regulate all the way down to room temperature I can melt several different materials for injection molding, so another use for this machine will be injection of casting wax into molds. This will let me make precise investment molds for metal casting.

Gold mirrors….. magic?

I have been following Russ Sadler’s series on Youtube for a while now, learning everything I can about my clone laser cutter. I honestly, watched about 3 hours of vids before I even uncrated it to make sure I didn’t mess anything up. In a recent video Russ showed some charts on wavelength reflectivity while trying to achieve maximum output from his laser tube. It seems not all mirrors reflect equally, and the material the mirror is made from makes a large difference in how much power makes it to the cutting board. The stock mirrors aren’t too shabby, but gold and silver mirrors rank higher with silver being the benchmark everything else is measure against. I thought to myself, since I plate silver and gold objects I need to get hold of Russ and see what we can come up with. After a couple emails (Russ is a super nice guy by the way), he sent some copper mirrors for me to plate and send back to him. We talked it over and since silver is susceptible to tarnishing we would try just gold plated mirrors.

Here is one of the copper discs with it’s electrode wire wrapped around it (click any pic to see a larger version if your browser allows it). I chose to go with a circumference contact to try and minimize any distortion on the mirror. Locating the electrode contact point in one area may have lead to a heavier deposit of gold due to a higher ‘charge’ or flow of electrons in a defined area. Stainless wire was used as the electrode since it is specified to be used as the anode in the gold solution.

Here is the disc in a prep bath, the cleaner makes sure the surface is ready to plate. It removes oils, tarnish, and makes the surface more receptive to plating. I limited the amount of time in the solution though to prevent any surface pitting. One again, I needed to be conscious of the surface as a mirror and not to distort it.

The disc is in the gold solution, doesn’t look very gold-like does it? You can see the Stainless anode to the back, plenty of surface area to carry the electroplating charge. Russ sent six disks, or two sets of 3 mirrors. I ran the first batch at 2.5 minutes plating time which is enough to coat the surface but isn’t a thick layer. I ran the second batch at 5 minutes and is the typical plating job I would do for jewelry or decorative objects.

Gold mirror on the left, copper on the right and both highly reflective of visible light. Once again, I tried to put as little gold on the first set to minimize and distortion that might happen, and ran the second set at standard thickness to see if there was any noticeable difference once installed in the machine. Now it’s time to pack them up and send them off to Russ for evaluation. I did not polish the mirrors or apply any treatment to the surfaces. It’s my belief that the anti-tarnish coating in the polish Russ used for the copper mirrors had adverse effects on the reflectivity of those mirrors. The light would have had to pass through that coating twice, once to reach the mirror and once leaving the mirror surface. Any diffraction in the coating would then have a double effect on the light path.

I excitedly await the results. If Russ posts a video on it I will put a link on the blog.

New toy….. I mean tool…..

I’m still trying to figure out which it is. Maybe it’s both… a grown-up toy that’s a cool tool. I have to admit I was pretty excited when the delivery guy pulled up out front and rolled up the door on the trailer. I took the day off just to make sure I was there. We got it off the truck and stashed it in the garage and that is when I realized…

That this is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Yeah, 4 feet long and over 2 feet on the other dimensions. Crap…..I don’t have any room for something this big. Hmm, maybe it’s all packing space and foam to insure the trip from China is a good one.

Nope, it’s all machine. One big, fat , awe inspiring 50 watt cnc laser cutter/engraver. So, I guess there is only one thing I can do…. re-arrange the garage and make room to squeeze it in. It fit in it’s new spot but barely. No pictures of it’s area until I make a decent stand for it, right now it’s on cinder blocks and portions of the packing crate. There is some redneck in the blood somewhere, at least it’s not my house on blocks. 😉

Of course it couldn’t be smooth sailing and laser light shows. Being a chinese product from mainland China I gave it a serious and thorough once over to make sure everything looked like it was in generally the right place. As soon as I plugged it in to the socket something cooked and the breaker to the garage popped. Not good. Turned out the culprit was the primary power supply for the electronics, not any of the expensive laser stuff yet.

Mmmm…. Toasty. Well, it gave me a good chance to see if the 3 year warranty was worth it. The people I had to talk with were in Hong Taiwan or something like that, so all correspondence was answered at 3 in the morning. They are paying for the replacement part and some time to do the work. Check is in the mail they say. We will see if it shows up. In the mean time, I needed to get this thing working, so a new power supply went in , got wired up, and turned on. All checked out, the laser powered up and smoked holes through some popsicle sticks I had laying around so it was time to try something. The very first attempt to cut a file turned out like this….

I’d say that was a success. Mom’s favorite embroidery file and a little text engraved, a square cut out to finish. The one thats right side up in the pic is actually in the hole it was cut from. The laser cuts a very very fine line.

One was cut from 1/16″ ply and the other from 1/8″ ply. The engraving in the 1/16th” ply went almost all the way through, leaving a thin layer about the thickness of a half sheet of paper. It looks kinda cool if you backlight it.

Each of those took under a minute to cut. It’s a lot quicker than using my cnc mills to do this kind of work. This last pic is a piece I just cut, a little over 10″ from top to bottom. Took about 2 minutes to cut and I’m really liking this machine.

Hi everyone……

Work has been keeping me busy, so I haven’t even thought of posting. Now that I have a new position in the company and am no longer head of the Maintenance department and the sole Parts person I can post occasionally again. Yay!

Lately I’ve been keeping my eye out for a grain mill, one of those things that takes wheat and turns it into flour and things like that. I had been holding out for the Cadillac of grain mills, a Diamant D525. Turns out I really don’t like the thought of spending around $1000 on a mill, go figure. So, my next pick was a Quaker City F4, with a retail of around $250 for the base raw cast iron model, or a little more for the fancy TIN coated one that makes clean up easier. I just happened to be looking on E-bey for some blacksmithing stuff and saw a QC F4 for sale, $75 as is missing parts. The kicker was, it was the TIN coated fancy one. The ‘Buy It Now’ button was firmly smacked and it was in my mailbox a few days later.

It is in great shape except the missing clamp to hold it down and a few bolts and wingnuts. I contacted Quaker City about replacement parts, clamp $75 and bolts a few bucks apiece. Nope, not going to pay that price. I have a machine shop in the garage for goodness sake, no way I’m paying $75 for a damn C-clamp with a hole in it. Off I went to OSH and picked up a 4″ C-clamp, some STAINLESS bolts and wingnuts, and a can of semi-gloss black spray paint. Total cost, $12 freaking dollars.

Score.

Take a look, there is almost no wear on the grinding plates. And… they are metal plates. None of the stone ground, wear your teeth out eating fine rock crap for me. The light surface rust will go away with the first milling, I’ll run a small bit of wheat through it and toss the results from the first rough grind.

Ok, time to modify the C-Clamp. A little work with the hack saw, drill press, and belt sander was all it took. About 20 minutes total while listening to Pandora and this is the result.

Fits like a glove and holds the mill tight and true. Spray Bomb love made it look good.

Put it all together after a thorough bath in suds, bleach, and hot water and ended up with this beauty for under $90 and a little attention.

And for those of you who know me, no, I didn’t wait more than 10 minutes to see how well it worked. I’m really happy with it. The grinding plates are like brand new and haven’t even worn in the spacing bosses yet, so I expected some course flour. Turns out even with the ‘virgin’ plates it turned out really nice wheat flour that made some really good bread. A little more than 3 cups of flour took about 15 minutes since I was playing with the settings. Figure I could do it under 10 minutes once I get a feel for the mill.

Sorry, no pics of the bread. It and a can of Red Feather butter disappeared before I even thought about taking pics. 😉

Melting metal…. with charcoal

Yup, anyone who knows me well knows I like to do stupid dangerous stuff. Things like really hot metal make me happy. Yes, I’ve burned myself (many times) and had some really really close calls but I never seem to learn my lesson. So if hot metal is good, molten metal is WAY better. I have a small kiln I use to melt down gold and silver for doing jewelry casting, but nothing big enough to do a decent pour in aluminum. Off to the internet I went and found plans to fabricate a small melt furnace powered by …. charcoal! I have to admit I was pretty excited, no propane or other gas fuels, nothing like a pesky cylinder to blow up if I get back-flask or the regulator goes wonky. So I built it, now to test it.

A handfull of charcoal and a blower fan out of a roadside dishwasher and we are in business!

After lighting the charcoal and turning on the blower I noticed that it didnt take long for heat waves to start pouring out of the vent hole, so being the smart person I am I opened the top to see what was going on. The charcoal was starting to catch good, lots of red ember. So I put some aluminum scraps in an old soup can and placed it deep in the furnace with some coals around it. Top goes back on and crank up the blower.

This is what it looked like at this point. Nice red hot color in their nice and bright….. wait, ….. whats that smell? Oh damn thats hot!!! I think I just melted off my eyebrows…..

Yeah, it was way hotter over that exhaust hole than I thought it would be. So I put a piece of aluminum over the top to deflect the heat coming out of that little hole to hell. In about 3 minutes I had this..

The exhaust had melted thought the aluminum 3″ above the hole and the force from the blower blew the center of the hole wide open. On the bright side, if its melting aluminum OUTSIDE the furnace, it must be hot enough inside to do the same, lets look at the pyrometer and see…

Yup, it should be nice and melty in there. Being me, I cant just leave it at that, I have to see for myself. So, turn off the blower, get welding gloves and some hay hooks to lift the lid off, pull out the soup can and turn it out over the concrete.

That my friends is melted aluminum. I made sure the concrete was plenty dry before casting the aluminum out on top of it, I dont need steam turning the concrete and aluminum into shrapnel for my face. Now to figure out something to cast for the next post……

HTI Hydropack

This weekend I went up and took a Wild Edibles class from Hammer Stryke Self-Reliance in Mariposa, Ca. (I’ll do a separate post on the class later) After the class I was talking with the instructor about water when you are out in areas not equipped with a faucet. I mentioned that I was a big fan of HTI Hydropacks, and no one else had heard of them before. I first heard about HTI products right after (or during) hurricane Katrina, there was talk of using hydropacks in the nasty water in the area, and that the technology worked well. For those that want to skip the rest of what I have to say and check out the company and product, link here.

Basically, the hydropack is a sports drink mix inside of a reverse osmosis filter pouch. The pack comes with filter/mix and a straw. Take the filter/mix and throw it into water (lake/stream/puddle) and wait while the reverse osmosis action sucks up moisture making a nice flavored drink in the pouch for you. Once you have the pouch filled, clean of a section of the pouch and punch the straw through just like a kids drink. For more detailed instructions the link above has even more links to pdf brochures.

A few personal notes on the hydropacks. They say 10-12 hours to fill a pack, but the most I’ve ever seen one of mine take is 5 hours. Granted I usually throw a couple in whatever water is nearby when I set up camp for the night and retrieve them in the morning before packing up and moving on the next morning. Also, the packs are fairly resilient. I have had them in my backpack through a couple camping trips, leaving them packed in the bag between trips, and haven’t had one fail yet. Lastly, they are LIGHT! The dry packs are barely noticeable weight, so packing a few just for backup is a no-brainer.

UV Paqlites

I was reading through some of my favorite webs the other day and came across SurvivalBlogs review of UV Paqlites . I was intrigued since I have a thing for tritium markers, and make a few things in the machine shop for personal use with them. After reading the review I went to UV Paqlites and ordered the Scout Pack, which is kind of a Paqlite sample kit. I like light sources that don’t require batteries, don’t wear out over time, aren’t one time use, and are reusable. There have been a few times camping and hiking where I have run out batteries, snapped a chem-light that was old, or for whatever reason just didnt have any light left, and tritium has always been my backup. The problem is tritium is expensive, its not always that bright, its works on radioactive beta decay, and it dims over time. Paqlites, according to their website, are just light absorbing crystals so one advantage is no radioactive particles bombarding my nuts if I carry one in my front pocket. Yay!

I received my package from the manufacturer in a couple days and have been playing with the lights all weekend. They seem to recharge their radiance very quickly, just a few minutes in sunlight or indoor lighting will make them glow brightly for a few minutes. Initially they glow bright enough the glow can be seen easily in a well lit room. After a few minutes the glow fades to very dim but consistent level. After reading the review in SurvivalBlog, I knew not to expect them to light up bright enough to see distant objects, basically being manufactured as a marker to locate stuff in the dark. I was pleasantly surprised to find that if my eyes were adjusted to the dark, I could easily navigate around an average sized room with the small Paqlite at 3am.

I’m going to continue using the contents of my scout kit and evaluating them for future use. As it stand now I’m impressed with them enough I will be placing an order for a few more scout kits to give to family to put in their kits for times when the power is out. I’ll write more about them once they have gone on a few outings and I have more experience with them.

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