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Motorcycles, tools, and garages! A little bit of everything mechanical and technical.

Showing posts with label CNC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CNC. Show all posts

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Mendelmax 2.0. Still Chuggin' Away!

Ran several batches of student projects the last couple of weeks...








Decided it was time to figure out why my prints seem to have pretty poor quality. Found a neat little calibration widget to try different settings on, and proceeded to try a BUNCH of different things out...





First and last. I'm almost positive I have a thermistor that is acting wonky on the hot end- supposedly I'm printing PLA at 174 deg. C.



I still think there is room for improvement on the quality of the print, but I'm pretty happy with the results. This is a replacement cone for the cooling fan in the background.



Going to attempt printing an e-nable hand, sort of for fun but maybe for someone that might want to give it a try. We'll see how it turns out!

Friday, December 26, 2014

New toy for Christmas!

So my awesome parents bought us a Silhouette Cameo for Christmas.  Scoff, if you like, but I am LOVING this thing.  Every garage should have one of these.  Been experimenting with vinyl but I'm really hoping I'll be able to cut gaskets with it too!



Got some successful cuts right off the bat.



They weren't perfect but after some fiddling I've gotten excellent results.  Next step was to make something... useful?  Sure.  Useful.  The boys (and I) got these for Christmas...





Needless to say, its hard to keep track of whose is whose with THREE of them ripping around...


So we spent the afternoon at school stripping them down and changing them up.

Before:


During:









Next step- custom stickers. Cut up some vinyl on the new Silhouette.







And viola!



Hot Wheels for me-



Snakes for Tater,



and Minecraft for Ike.



Sunday, May 11, 2014

Jealous.

My neighbor at school ordered a Shop Bot CNC router several weeks ago- it FINALLY showed up.  I don't know who's more excited about it- him or me. 


















Now if only I could find enough donors for my CNC plasma cutter!

Thursday, September 12, 2013

"VACANT" experiments.

My principle asked me if I could come up with some sort of system to let people know if one of our handicapped bathrooms was occupied.  I kicked around a few ideas and came up with this.  



Been awhile since I've used the printer so I fired it up...



Dang, the MM 2.0 is just tooooo fast. Let me slow that down a bit.








These were supposed to be test prints checking for size, but I decided they were plenty good enough, even running at 121% of maximum speed!


Here's the rest of the sign for the bathroom... Left goes on the outside, right on the inside.



Bar will go through a hole in the door, then the covers go over the dials and are screwed to the door. That way, you can tell from inside the bathroom what it says outside.



Inside:



Outside.



Little rough for a print, but again, I was running pretty darn fast.

Cleaned them up a bit with an acetone fuming,









Slapped some paint on the disks,



and gathered up all the parts.



Tried gluing in a clear piece of plastic to prevent kids from sticking a pencil in there and turning it from the outside... We'll see how long that lasts.



Drill a hole in a perfectly good door,



Put the bar in the front disk and slide it through,



and screw the cover on over top.



On the back:



Put the knob on,



and screw it's cover on.



There you go!





Guess we'll see if it works or not.  Thats the best part about the printer-  I can make changes and run off a new copy in just a few minutes.  Glad that I've been able to use the printer around the school for more than just student projects!