- Still working on the Chain Drive Clock. There’s a lot of electronics, software, mechanicals and other processes in this project.
- Video out about the Supply boxes around the studio
- Working on a video about our new Aciera F5 mill. We are very happy with this machine!
- Working on cutting a lot of numbers out of Lexan. It’s not laser friendly, and the CNC is not excited about cutting it either…
- Designing a faster way to make the Wine Display project – a whole lotta CNCing. Build time should be reduced to an hour or two. Down from a few days.
- Working on the design for a cool, small table.
- Working on the display frame for the Chain Drive Clock.
- A whole lot of rocket launches this week. We put them up on the huge screen in the gallery. SpaceX’s SN8 was awesome.
- Set up the Electronics workbench with a nice tool chest, etc. It’s nice to have a dedicated workspace for this stuff.
- Going through the storage area and labeling things. Sorting things. Organizing things.
- Started a project to beef up the main CNC router. Ordered parts to stiffen the gantry, and improve the spindle. 9 horsepower, 3 phase spindle!!!
- Installed components to stiffen the CNC Router Gantry. Much better.
- Reg is back! Building a bunch of Wine Racks for David at dfwine.ca. The CNC Router has been very busy cutting all the parts for the wine racks. We are using a new design that is more CNC friendly – but a bit less sexy than the last iteration.
- Repaired a chair! It’s nice to be able to weld stuff whenever you want.
Hey! We’re famous!
We were very happy to see an article about us published in the excellent Ottawa Arts web site Apt613.ca!
Bruce Burwell wrote a very nice article about us, focused on the sign out in front of our building, which we’ve been updating every few weeks. Thanks for the nice article Bruce, and for taking the time to come visit.
We also noticed some pretty fun posts about our sign on Reddit here, and here! It is nice to see that we’re having a small positive effect on Ottawa in these difficult times.
Thanks everyone!
The Nazca Cat
The Nazca Cat project is a sort of “neon” sign made in the shape of the Nazca Cat found on a hillside in Peru in October 2020. I liked the design of the cat, and found a nice image from a news story on CBC. Some quick digitizing in Vectric Aspire, a bit of CNC Routing, and some LED “neon” lighting, and the project was complete! It looks great in the window of our studio!
Here’s the lights I used from eBay: LED Strip Neon Lights 2835 SMD 120LED/M Flexible Silicone Tube Waterproof 12V 5M
(I’d check around on ebay for the best deal on these. And also look for a 12V power supply. 3Amps or more)
CAT40 Tool Holders
We recently took delivery of an Aciera F5 mill. This is a very high quality Swill mill from the 80’s. It’s a joy to use!
At first we were keeping our tooling in a drawer – but the tools quickly overflowed the drawer – plus they were banging around and could get damaged. Time for action!
It was just a few minutes work to draw up a tool holder in Vectric VCarve Pro, then export it to SheetCAM in order to create a tool path for our Langmuir Systems plasma cutter. We literally had the tool holder done inside 10 minutes. I love this sort of project – one that really shows how quick the whole toolchain is, from software to plasma cutter to finished result in just a few minutes. And, now we have plenty of tool storage! (Which is getting full…)
The Wine Display
A friend of Rich’s, David Francis is a wine dealer in Montreal Quebec at dfwine.ca. Dave needed a rack for displaying and selling wine in corner stores and grocery stores throughout Quebec. He came to me with an idea for a wine display that looked like a stack of wine cases. It looked like a cool project, so we decided to help Dave with a prototype display.
The display easily assembles and disassembles for transport, and is solid and good looking in any store. It also has provision for a display card at the top, and also doesn’t take up too much valuable store real estate.
We made a pretty cool video about this. Please check it out here!
Here’s some photos as well.
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