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.
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.
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!
This is approximately half of a soldering jig built for the assembly of the big lighting project we are doing for Studio1Thousand. Can’t really divulge more about the project until it is public, but suffice it to say that these jigs will really come in handy while soldering up the nearly 10,000 LEDs…
Here’s a fun weird thing.
Another aluminum item for artist Lucy Pullen. This is 1/8” thick aluminum (which is pretty stiff), but when you cut out so much of it the whole sheet gets kind of…floppy. It is a really weird thing to see a sheet of aluminum do.
Here’s a nice pile of aluminum widgets I cut today on the CNC milling machine. These are for artist Lucy Pullen, though these are not for her artwork, per se. In addition to her artistic talents, Lucy is also an avid apiarist. These pieces are part of a system she has developed to help her make hand-dipped beeswax candles. “A nice mix of high- and low-tech”, as she put it.
Here’s the full-size version of that powder coating fixture we built for a large project with Studio1Thousand. 1,800 of these little brass tubes get coated with a Tiger Coatings series 44 flat black matte powder, while the ends remain bare for soldering. Coating this many tubes is time consuming no matter how you do it, but the alternative to this fixture is to manually wrap each end of each tube with the appropriate width of high-temp masking tape…that is a soul-crushing job that I would wish on no one.
These are the fun projects to work on.
Salt and pepper shaker set in solid mahogany for Sarah Quinn, another Pratt Institute Industrial Design program student. Each is 1.5” across, ~3” tall. Fully machined on all sides. These are going to look even better once they are sanded and oiled.
Mahogany is a joy to work with- unlike most woods, the grain does not tend to tear out and cause destroyed parts and massive frustration. It is still the material of choice for sand-casting patterns which need to be cheap, light, and easy to machine.
Right now these are not available for sale, but as soon as they are I will post up a link.
Also, if you need to make something like this, please don’t hesitate to email us at design@rushdesign.net
