Motorcycles, metal working, sheet metal, welding, TIG, MIG, education, cafe racers, old trucks, mendelmax 2.0 3D printer, vintage, technology and design, custom hand made Hot Wheels, old John Deere, stationary, hit and miss engines. A little bit of everything in the garage.
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Motorcycles, tools, and garages! A little bit of everything mechanical and technical.
Steerable wheels on a 1:64 custom? Sure. Why not!?
On to the back end. Cut some chunks out of some aluminum scrap.
Drill a bunch of holes, file them down, and end up with these.
Frame is starting to come together. Tricky part is going to be figuring out how to attach the two front wheels together so they actually steer, but I've got a plan for that!
Heck, you don't even have to buy it- if you tell someone about it and they end up buying it I'll give you $500.
We are moving two whole blocks. Getting a new shop and an olllldddd
house. Have to sell our current house first though. Won't say much
about it here other than its in pretty darn good shape, is in an awesome
location, and we love our neighbors. You can read more about it here:
Yes, March is nearly over and I'm posting about Valentines day... Made this for Mrs. Punch.
Doesn't really show well in the pics but I managed to get some neat color patters in it with the torch. A student of mine wanted to try making something a little different. She got on Instructables and found a copper rose, but we didn't have any copper. We experimented with some 22g sheet metal and her's turned out so good I had to make one of my own for my wife. Must have turned out okay, because she was impressed with it.
I used to always think that my dream "job" would be to be "retired" and be able to just putter around in a shop all day and make whatever I wanted. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I really think that teaching has pushed me to try a lot of new things that I would never have wanted to or even known about had it not been for students asking some silly question or wanting to try something new.
Its pretty amazing, the things that you learn when you teach.
So finally getting around to posting the build I participated in a month or two ago. The theme this time was "A Day at the Drags". Wasn't really planning on joining in on this one, but I got to poking around through some Hot Wheels and had a bit of an epiphany one night while eating at Red Robin with the family. So follow along with the build that was concieved on a napkin. Pardon the bbq sauce...
Started out with these two castings, but eventually settled on using the yellow one.
And start cuttin.
So I tried something brand new out with this build. Scratch built wheels.
Don't know why but this stance just does it for me.
Rest of the parts done. The tensioner block is on backwards but you get the idea.
Starting to run the strings.
Running the elastic.
Tensioner block.
Looks pretty messy...
But cleaned up nice!
Still working out the kinks but it seems to function pretty darn well. I'm guessing I have about 2 hours of time into the build, and that includes getting the printer set up and clearing the parts. I did it 3 prints of about 4 hours each (with some extra parts). I think with some practice I could crank one of these out a day if I got the printer started in the morning and did all of the parts in a single batch. A larger nozzle would sure help speed up print time. Guess I know what to put on my wish list!
A couple of weeks ago I had kind of a wild hair and came up with this little guy. Flywheel is made out of a penny, and it will run on air from your breath!
It started out as this pile of leftover parts from past Hot Wheels builds.
All of that got turned into these bits.
Gotta have some semi-unique tools to do all that though. The jewelers saw and pin vice / jewelers drill are lotsa fun to play with.
Getting the rotating assembly put together.
Piston, cylinder, and associated bits.
This type of engine is commonly called a "Wobbler" or an Oscillating Steam Engine, because the entire cylinder wobbles back and forth. As it does, one of these holes lines up with the hole in the cylinder, letting pressure in to push the piston down. On the way back up, the other hole lines up and lets the pressure out.
And of course, some videos of it running. First one shows me powering it with my lungs and then a longer run with the air compressor. Second vid was the second time I had ever gotten it to run, using the air compressor on that one.
This was a lot of fun to make. It was even more fun to watch the band teacher, who you would think has lung capacity to spare, turn red, then purple, then white trying to get it to go!
