Progress! Our PracticallyCNC router is making progress!
These are brand new Y-axis gantry drive plates, with 2 new 800 ounce-inch stepper motors. We still need to complete the jackshaft bearing block, and test the assembly out, but this is a big step forward.
More photos soon!
Time-lapse photography is fun! Here’s another one of some solid maple furniture parts cutting on the milling machine. These are for Tomoko Yokoyama, another Graduate Industrial Design student at Pratt Institute.
Boy, do I love cutting Mahogany. It holds fine detail, the grain doesn’t tear out, and it looks really beautiful when you sand it out and oil it (please note- the parts in these photos have not been fully sanded, or oiled at all).
More prototype parts for Pratt Industrial Design student I-Chao Wang. These are a series of playful wobble toys. Each piece will get additional parts such as tiny mobile red clown ball noses which help give them whimsical personalities. I will definitely put up photos of the finished items once I get them.
The cast stainless steel bases are weighted very well for the size of the toys. They wobble for quite a long time!
More furniture work for Pratt Industrial Design students! This is a small table for Melissa Robelo in poplar-core plywood with walnut veneer.
Yay for time-lapse photography!
It’s that time of year again- more work for Pratt students!
This piece is a desk top for David Hsu, a graduate Industrial Design student. It is a rather complicated faceted shape which required cutting from both sides of the part.
The trick to cutting a part like this is to cut one side, then turn it over, screw it to a piece of plywood up from UNDERNEATH the plywood. Then, you can move the whole plywood/part assembly around until it is aligned with the machine again, clamp it down, and start cutting the second side.
Voila! Both sides match up (nearly) perfectly!
In line with yesterday’s post, here is the beast of a motor that will drive the X-axis of the new CNC router. This is a NEMA 34 frame stepper motor with 1288 ounce-inches of holding torque. To give you a better idea of what that means, if you attached a foot long bar to the motor’s shaft, it could hold a 6.7lb weight in place on it. That may not sound like much, but torque is a weird unit to get a grasp of, and it is also going through a gear reduction on the machine, so in the end it is quite a lot of force!
Slowly, but surely, this machine is coming together. This is the basic frame of the new CNC router we are building. In its former life it was a CNC plasma cutter, but it is destined for greater things.
Here are some burn-in photos of the S1k lighting job we have been sharing. This is only 33% of them its going to be very bright in the loft!
CNC routing again. These are chair parts for REASON furniture design.
These are created by first cutting 90-degree Vs into what will be the backs or insides of the parts using a rather fancy Amana miter-folding v-cutter head. Then, they are cut out, forming the component parts which can then be assembled into the complete chair.
The material is FSC-certified Southern Yellow Pine A/C underlayment-grade plywood. This wood is sustainable, and completely from the Eastern Seaboard of the US. Jake at REASON clearly takes this stuff very seriously, and we applaud him for that.
There will be bar stools, side tables, and even a dining table coming soon. Be sure to watch this space for photos of the assembled products!
This is a test…
Each LED cluster is tested just after being soldered to ensure a good connection, proper installation and of course that they work. I’d explain more but I’m not allowed to and don’t have the time. Lots more clusters to make!!!
LED’s everywhere!
Lots of tiny clusters to be built. Behind the soldering iron is pile of a few THOUSAND LED’s to be assembled into a mysterious, functional project for one of our great clients. We can’t wait ‘till it’s all done and we can share the full scope of this one!
Behold! Yet another strange contraption!
This is a modified arbor press, which we are going to use to crimp electrical connectors onto brass tubes (yes, the same brass tubes that we previously powder coated).
These arbor presses are great. ENCO sells them for $25.95!! Seriously! Being so cheap, they make a great starting point for any number of different types of assembly tools, as long as they require a pressing motion. Also, they are made of really cheap Chinese cast iron, so they are really easy to mill and drill into!
The red-handled gizmo is a toggle clamp. Toggle clamps are really neat. That little clamp will exert 100 lbs. of clamping force, yet only takes a couple of pounds of force to lock into place. The other great thing about these clamps is that when you open them up they swing completely out of the way, making it very easy to load and unload parts.
And once again, I still cannot yet tell you what this is for. I’m sorry. It won’t be too much longer now.
Well, we thought it was bad when the burned-out car was abandoned across the street from the shop, but apparently things have gone downhill since then… The whole billboard just got blown over.
THE END IS NIGH!!!
So this is an exciting thing that happened just outside the shop - Just so you know, it’s windy as all hell today here in the five boroughs, so windy in fact that this billboard right down the street caught the breeze and blew over ON to the BQE and then on to Meeker Ave. Kinda caused a hell of a mess - Apparently, nobody was hurt.
Here’s the whole soldering jig for the big Studio1Thousand project, finally!
Sometimes it seems easier to just cobble things together, or do things the shady way. When it gets to the point where you have to do something over and over, thousands of times, you have to make fixtures or jigs to help you get it done. It’s not only important to help you do the work more quickly, but also to help ensure that errors are reduced to an acceptable level. You really don’t want to get 1,000 pieces into a manufacturing run, only to find out that one person has been doing their work in a slightly different way than everyone else…
Again, can’t exactly tell you what these are for yet, but we will definitely post up some photos when the project is public!
