More Small Things
The fix I was working on back in December for making those model parts did pan out, after a fashion. It didn't work out the way I'd expected, but the eventual solution gave far better results than I was getting earlier.
I'm absolutely stoked. I ran three new sets of parts and sent them out. The very next day my mill computer finally gave up the ghost and died. No smoke, no fanfare, it just quit finishing the POST part of the boot process. I'd dig deeper, but it's a laptop, it's old, and a pristine specimen would go for about $20 on Ebay these days. It's simply not worth it.
I picked up a donor machine from work. It's 500MHz (about 5 times faster than the previous model) and is a full tower machine. If it's in decent shape I can probably nurse it along for another five years. I'll play tonight.
Meanwhile I'm drawing up as many of these parts as I can. They're all round, so it's all lathe work. Each one has a different profile and a different length. I'm making life easier by making the toolpaths all begin and end the same, and expect the same size stock. That way I can pre-dice the stock and have it in a pile, then just load and hit go. Each part takes between three and four minutes to run, so it actually goes pretty quickly.
I'm hoping by the end of this I'll have swamped them in parts so they can stay busy for a while. That'll give me the breathing room I need to do the R&D on the next class of parts. These will all require I make hard molds for resin casting. One of the simpler parts will require at least three parts to the mold. Heck of a way to get into the mold making business. Over my head? You bet.
But back to the round parts: So far I've made five runs for these folks at six parts per run. I've got thirteen drawn up and plan to get at least eight more drawn up before I start. Now that I've worked out how to do the workholding, tooling, toolpath strategy, etc., the process should be pretty quick. The more parts I have drawn up beforehand, the easier it'll be. I'm hoping by the time I have the mill back on its feet I'll have over twenty new sets I can run.
The next question is material. All of these are made from 1/8" brass rod. I've depleted everything the local hardware store has. It's time to either order from an industrial supplier or find another local source.
I'm glad this part of the R&D cycle is done for these parts. They've been needing them for over a year. I've felt pretty rotten about being a bottleneck and holding them back. I'm hoping with a deluge of these things hitting them, it'll take them long enough to make all the mating parts to give me a chance to do the R&D on the mold making.
There's another side to all this: I can see where these techniques can be used on other projects. At one point I was making rocket nozzles. Unfortunately the size of the nozzles I was making were tiny, no more than a few millimeters in diameter at the throat. At the time it stretched my tools to their utmost. Now? After making these parts for these folks, a few millimeters is huge. I could make nozzles with my hands tied behind my back using this setup.
I'm also eager to experiment with molds. One fellow rocket enthusiast I used to trade email with made some nozzles for cold rockets by casting them. He had mixed luck until he started using an honest to goodness casting resin. After that he was limited by the quality of the mold. I'm hoping the combination of techniques I develop making these small parts and making these small molds will put me in a position to offer this guy better nozzle molds for his rockets.
What else can I do using these techniques? Seems like there are a lot of possibilities. I just need to explore them and see where they lead me. One thing is certain: Using my mill as a lathe works amazingly well. I need to make a multi-tool magazine to really take advantage of it, though. Right now I'm limited to a single tool. With multiple tool setups incredibly detailed parts could be made completely automatically. It's a fantastic thought. Can't wait to play with it.
--Pencil
P.S. I was curious to see if the same people who have been leaving me advertisements in my comments would want to use my last post as an advertisement. Incredibly, no one posted comments. No one posted ads on that one. Guess I should be angry more of the time. It makes for lousy advertising.
P.P.S. Know what's even worse? I came back an hour after writing this post, and found two advertisement comments that were utterly unrelated to the post. One was for a swinger's site, another for a porn site. Go figure.
P.P.P.S. Three more this morning, not a one related to the topic or the content. Forget it. No more comments.
I'm absolutely stoked. I ran three new sets of parts and sent them out. The very next day my mill computer finally gave up the ghost and died. No smoke, no fanfare, it just quit finishing the POST part of the boot process. I'd dig deeper, but it's a laptop, it's old, and a pristine specimen would go for about $20 on Ebay these days. It's simply not worth it.
I picked up a donor machine from work. It's 500MHz (about 5 times faster than the previous model) and is a full tower machine. If it's in decent shape I can probably nurse it along for another five years. I'll play tonight.
Meanwhile I'm drawing up as many of these parts as I can. They're all round, so it's all lathe work. Each one has a different profile and a different length. I'm making life easier by making the toolpaths all begin and end the same, and expect the same size stock. That way I can pre-dice the stock and have it in a pile, then just load and hit go. Each part takes between three and four minutes to run, so it actually goes pretty quickly.
I'm hoping by the end of this I'll have swamped them in parts so they can stay busy for a while. That'll give me the breathing room I need to do the R&D on the next class of parts. These will all require I make hard molds for resin casting. One of the simpler parts will require at least three parts to the mold. Heck of a way to get into the mold making business. Over my head? You bet.
But back to the round parts: So far I've made five runs for these folks at six parts per run. I've got thirteen drawn up and plan to get at least eight more drawn up before I start. Now that I've worked out how to do the workholding, tooling, toolpath strategy, etc., the process should be pretty quick. The more parts I have drawn up beforehand, the easier it'll be. I'm hoping by the time I have the mill back on its feet I'll have over twenty new sets I can run.
The next question is material. All of these are made from 1/8" brass rod. I've depleted everything the local hardware store has. It's time to either order from an industrial supplier or find another local source.
I'm glad this part of the R&D cycle is done for these parts. They've been needing them for over a year. I've felt pretty rotten about being a bottleneck and holding them back. I'm hoping with a deluge of these things hitting them, it'll take them long enough to make all the mating parts to give me a chance to do the R&D on the mold making.
There's another side to all this: I can see where these techniques can be used on other projects. At one point I was making rocket nozzles. Unfortunately the size of the nozzles I was making were tiny, no more than a few millimeters in diameter at the throat. At the time it stretched my tools to their utmost. Now? After making these parts for these folks, a few millimeters is huge. I could make nozzles with my hands tied behind my back using this setup.
I'm also eager to experiment with molds. One fellow rocket enthusiast I used to trade email with made some nozzles for cold rockets by casting them. He had mixed luck until he started using an honest to goodness casting resin. After that he was limited by the quality of the mold. I'm hoping the combination of techniques I develop making these small parts and making these small molds will put me in a position to offer this guy better nozzle molds for his rockets.
What else can I do using these techniques? Seems like there are a lot of possibilities. I just need to explore them and see where they lead me. One thing is certain: Using my mill as a lathe works amazingly well. I need to make a multi-tool magazine to really take advantage of it, though. Right now I'm limited to a single tool. With multiple tool setups incredibly detailed parts could be made completely automatically. It's a fantastic thought. Can't wait to play with it.
--Pencil
P.S. I was curious to see if the same people who have been leaving me advertisements in my comments would want to use my last post as an advertisement. Incredibly, no one posted comments. No one posted ads on that one. Guess I should be angry more of the time. It makes for lousy advertising.
P.P.S. Know what's even worse? I came back an hour after writing this post, and found two advertisement comments that were utterly unrelated to the post. One was for a swinger's site, another for a porn site. Go figure.
P.P.P.S. Three more this morning, not a one related to the topic or the content. Forget it. No more comments.
posted by pencil at 1:25 PM
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