As you know I recently purchased a milling machined to be able to do some custom PCB stuff along with some intro level metal working. Well today I thought that I would try to create a collet holder that would have its sizes clearly visible. However being short on time and on a break from some “real” work I made an end mill holder for my 10 piece set from grizzly instead.
I am using a method that I invented I termed: Self threading square tube insert method. Whats so cool about this is it combines fairly easy cuts of aluminum that pretty much anyone can do with a band saw, hand saw or rusty pocket knife… Well not the last one and I don’t suggest you try it. But is very cool. Basically its all in the spacing of the 4 holes that were laser cut that the aluminum sits below. Its a very tight squeeze which allows the screws to “self thread” inside the square tube’s inside. Hence the name. Not super witty but it describes it nicely. Comments, questions or concerns always welcome. Next thing to make is the collet holder.
So my workshop was begining to become littered with metal bits from my new Grizzly G0463 Metalworking Mill. So I got a good deal on a iROBOT dirt dawg. This little guy has been great. I have been a long time consumer of the iRobots but have found that having 3 100lbs+ dogs tend to “tire” the robots out faster than normal. That being said this shop cleaning robot seems to preform as expected cleaning the workshop. In all honesty I am very impressed with it.
However, My metal cutting table has clamping T’s that little bits of metal would fall down into and become very much of a pain to clean. So I decided to fab a part in google sketchup for the T slots to help extract the junk. So a few quick measurements with my digital caliper and I was good to go.
My first attempt at a rack for a rack and pinion setup on the laser cutter.. All by hand in sketchup.. not super great so far but getting close… Once more unto the breach..
So a side project that I am co-authoring is the Contraptor project. Well what is Contraptor? The exact words from the project home page is:
“Contraptor is a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping.”
What does that even mean? It means its a cool system that allows you to make cages, stands, frames whatever for your evil mad scientist projects that you have dreamed up and glued to a shoe box to present created a unique display for. Here is one of the things you can build with the framework.
What else can you build? Well its up to you. I have been working on my Wireless Antenna Sniper Bot:
But the sky is the limit on what you can build. Newly added Contraptor components is Synthetos laser cut plexi-glass pieces. These are really cool because the allow you to “glue” Contraptor parts together and create new Contraption’s that you were no able to create before. They are still in the Beta stage of Contraptor components but you can see them on the Wifi Bot V2 above. They are the black parts holding the top together. So go forth and make something cool!
