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What’s Happening Now – April 2022

04.12.2022 by rich // Leave a Comment

  • Working on Voronoi Cubbies. I really like the Voronoi pattern, as used in nature by the patterns on a giraffe and the wings of a dragon fly. It’s an interesting mathematical solution for filling a space. I designed a square shelf unit, and then filled out the shelves using a Voronoi pattern. I cut the top and bottom plates on the CNC router, and then cut the dividers by hand, carefully fitting them into the slots provided by the CNC router. It’s been an interesting project. I’m considering making a bunch of them. The cubbies will be painted.
    Fitting dividers for the cubbies
    Fitting dividers for the cubbies

    With the top plate fitted.

 

  • While cutting the Voronoi panel, I had an error in my cutting tool path, which ended up with a loose piece of wood being in the path of the 1/2″ router bit. As the cutter passed by, the piece of wood was thrown from the CNC router, and exited the building via a window in the garage door. It was slightly exciting.
    Hole where the CNC Router flung a piece of wood

     

  • I am continuing to work on the bell project. I have shifted focus to the design of the IO electronics board for a while. I’m planning to use a Raspberry Pi 4 as the control computer, and the IO board will connect using the 2×20 pin bus. The IO board will have relays, inputs, power supply, servo connections, etc. It has to be adaptable to power all the different kinds of mechanisms that will be required to ring bells, from thimble size, to church size! It will ring bells via solenoids, stepper motors, and dc gear motors. The inputs will be used for limit switches and user buttons.
  • We’ve been installing a gallery picture hanging system with rails, and cables that hang down. 
  • We are upgrading our dust collection. Our current dust collector is a Laguna system, and it’s not meeting our expectations at all. It was pretty horrible to assemble, and just doesn’t work well. We are planning to relegate it to about 1/2 of the shop and are trying out a Harvey Woodworking G-700 for use with the table saw and jointer. Why don’t dust collector manufacturers provide more than one remote? Or even the option to buy multiple remotes??
  • Looking into making more Voronoi cubbies. 
  • The main shop air compressor is failing. It could be the motor or the relay that controls the motor. We are looking into it!

 

Categories // CNC Router, Now, Projects, Woodworking

The Nazca Cat

11.12.2020 by rich // Leave a Comment

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!

Check out the video:

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)

The Nazca Cat The Nazca Cat Nazca Cat Nazca Cat Nazca Cat Nazca Cat

Categories // Projects

CAT40 Tool Holders

11.08.2020 by rich // Leave a Comment

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…)

 

CAT40 Tool holder CAT40 Tool holder Tool holder design in Vectric The Aciera F5 Mill

Categories // Projects

The Wine Display

11.07.2020 by rich // Leave a Comment

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.

The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack The Wine Rack

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