Coffee 1-12-113

Good morning! Come in, take a minute or two & join us in fellowship and a good start to the weekend. We have fine fresh Folgers perked and ready for our enjoyment. Sure smells good! I'm thinking we'll splurge today on Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches. They are a little pricy, but plenty good. When it comes to a store bought breakfast sandwich, you certainly get what you pay for. Oh, wait... I hear footsteps.... I know we have English muffins, bacon, eggs & cheese.... maybe I can talk the cook into home made sandwiches. Now we're talkin' good!

We've had a few days above freezing. It got the ice off the driveway. Next week it looks like back into the freezer we go. It's January, what did we expect? The Axeman Anderson is happily purring away. It loves this time of year.

My home made CNC machine got a workout this week. My "R2D2 friend" Paul made a batch of "side vents" for himself and others out of aluminum. We also made a 16 inch gear set to make R2's dome spin. We put about 20 hours of cutting time on the CNC machine & made lot's of aluminum chips. I told him I wasn't going to empty the vacuum cleaner, I was instead taking it in for it's weight in aluminum junk value. If you do a Youtube search for "Paul's R2D2" you'll find lot's of videos of his hobby. Basically, he built an R2D2 & takes it to the cancer center to put a smile on kids faces. Now he is building a second one, this one mainly aluminum rather than plastic. Fun stuff!

Hope you all enjoy the weekend!

id be more interested in your homemade cnc and would always enjoy seeing shop idea's or photo's of you actually building the R2D2 (example: how did you make the "dome" top, the cuts appear to be Lazar cut?, is their any motors installed on this thing?)... I WANT THE SHOP ASPECTS OF THIS Can you make a separate thread called "the making of R2D2" (truly a great finished product though! Props to You!)

Thanks for the coffee, and the machinist in me would like to see R2D2 as well.

My machinist career is kind of odd in that I started out with manual machinists equipment and then went into the cnc stuff. It was a little different in telling a machine what to do then making it do it via hand controls, but I love the exactness you get with cnc...going down to .0001 is pretty fine tuning to say the least.

The curse of being a machinist is that you can build anything, it is just figuring out if your time is worth it, that makes it hard. So many times the parts people hand me a part and then the price for it, and I look at it and say, "Jeesh, I could build that", which is true, but most of the time I do not have the time to dedicate to a project to just save me $50 bucks.

I have built a few things just for fun. I do woodworking as a hobby so I made a few presentation tools: a stainless steel rabbiting plane, a stainless steel dovetail saw and some other highly refined tools. I made them so that they work, and work extremely well, but they are built for show...to be put in a case and given as gifts that can hang on the wall. The dovetail saw was given to a friend of the family who got injured on the job as a carpenter and was disabled. I put it in a wooden case with red felt inside. For fun I test-cut the saw on a piece of aromatic cedar, then glued that to the case, then with a silver chain attached a small sanding block onto the case so whenever he wants, he can open the case, sand the cedar and get the smell of the cedar over and over again. Since they are stainless, I polished both to a mirror shine, which is why the quarter is in the picture, without it, you would never see that it is a plane polished literally to a mirror finish.

The hand plane took a year to build, and the saw took about 6 months...working on and off on them of course. Some machine work, like the brass saw nuts, but mostly hand made with hand tools. Both took about a week to polish.

Thanks for the coffee, Freddy, but I am in a hurry. Just a Green Tea w/honey and a Blueberry muffin for me. Om my way to Concealed-Carry class.
50f out there, this morning, and so foggy I gotta use my snowplow to scrape a tunnel thru it. Outta be a fun drive.

Oh I guess while I am at it I will show you another woodworking tool I made, though this one has no real purpose. It is a slitter, which was used in the old days to cut strips of leather, felt, canvas etc. You would set the fence to the distance you wanted to cut and then lower the blade and then it would cut.

Not one to be happy with just a replica of a tool, I made numerous improvements to the original design. The first was putting in stainless steel wear bars. I did this so that when the nut cinches up against the arm to hold the slitter at a set distance, the bolt sits down on the polished stainless steel bar that is in the shape of an arrow...just to make things interesting, and not on top of wood. And the fence itself has a 1/4 inch plate of polished stainless steel so that as it rubs along the edge of whatever it is cutting, the wood will not wear out.

But the blade is the real improvement. It uses a standard utility knife blade so that the blade can be changed quickly and be super sharp which is an improvement over the old "nicker" design. It can also be lowered an exact distance through a set of worm gears and springs. Unlike the original 1800 design which always left the cutting edge exposed, my design allows the blade to be lowered form 0"-to 3/4 of an inch. I then made the blade mechanism changeable without tools by simply pressing on a spot that detaches the blade allowing you to swap in a new, sharper blade in seconds.

But while this slitter works, and works well and is designed to never wear out, it is still a presentation tool, and meant to sit in its custom made glass display case (with hand cut dovetails no less) and look pretty. You would probably give a tool like this to an employee that worked at the company for 25 years or more...a gift of that nature. But when I build these tools, I make sure that they must work well for what they were intended, even if they most likely won't be used.

Mornin all. You're a good woman Marty This is outstanding. Got the farrier coming out this AM to trim up the horses--I think I still got a barn down there--like you Chris, visibility is minus ZIP--had one horse off his food last night & just wanted to lay down--I went down twice & lit off the old shot gun which got him up buckin, fartin & hopefully poopin--got to go check. Later guys--Have to check out out that R2D2--nice work NS.

Beautiful work NoSmoke! I enjoy seeing that sort of thing. You have good eye hand work & plenty of patience. Sweet stuff!

The R2D2 is Paul's project. I came in late in his ongoing story. Some of the parts ( like the dome) he purchased, other parts he has made. His specialty is the software & computer aspect of it. Yes, all the doors are remote control and motorized. I'd have to go count, but I think it's seven doors with arms, camera's, projectors, light displays, etc behind each one. It's a tricky thing as Lucas films of course owns the rights, but they allow a club of builders to make personal copies. You can't build them & sell them....or even that parts, but, if you are a club member such as Paul, then you can get a group together & hire a machine shop to make a run of a particular part. So, it was arranged that "my shop" made the side vents & dome gears. If you Google "Paul's R2D2" you'll find many blogs & such that he has posted. Also a Facebook page. Any of the CNC vidoes are my machine. Here's a pic taken yesterday.

Just wanted to pop in and say morning, thanks for the coffee Fred. FF hope that horse is ok. Gotta go.

@freddie , thanks for the pic, thats fantastic and i bet you got no monthly payments to make on that CNC
I LOVE your high tech non rolling stool (maybe mount some casters on those antique spindles and then you could really be jet set)

great stuff freddie!

Quick update--my guy is at least up & about--(the one on the left) can't beat these 1/4 horses for ruggedness. I can't imagine what he might of gotten in to, but I'm going to do a pasture search. That old shotgun usually works with gut things--plan B woulda been getting some gun powder down him--now that's a PIA for the both of us

Thanks for the coffee and breakfast sandwiches. They sure hit the spot. I just watched a few Paul's R2D2 videos. Most impressive. You guys did an excellent job! I too would like to see a separate thread for it with pictures and videos.

Today, I will be taking my christmas tree down finally and then I'm going to disassemble the old draft inducer and clean it up. Hopefully, with any luck by the other day I'll get to relax and play some Fallout: New Vegas before my wife leaves for work.

Good morning , my coffee is hot and black. 0 Visibility here as well. Barn day time to do the mid winter clean up .

Morning all, super work on all those projects! I am still determined to get an education in machining and my younger brother built a cnc machine from internet plans. I am planing one of them also. Amazing what they will do and i can use it in my finish work. Wow, warm here today, gonna hit 74 they say. Not that I'm complaining mind you. Well, off to see the granddaughters. They have been sick so we have been staying away!

Kevin

KLook wrote:Morning all, super work on all those projects! I am still determined to get an education in machining and my younger brother built a cnc machine from internet plans. I am planing one of them also. Amazing what they will do and i can use it in my finish work. Wow, warm here today, gonna hit 74 they say. Not that I'm complaining mind you. Well, off to see the granddaughters. They have been sick so we have been staying away!

Kevin

I converted an old Bridgeport Boss5 CNC mill to all new stepper drivers and running off Mach3 software. The Drives run off the printer ports on a PC. We use it mostly for drilling our grates. It saves a lot of time. When we bought the company they were still drilling them by hand on a drill press.
I have been off since Christmas and just starting to feel better. What ever is going around hope you don't get it . This is the first year that I wished I got a flu shot. It feels like I have a truck parked on top of me.

Morning everybody. It's another fine day in paradise! Looking at some higher "relatively speaking" temps in the next few days and some rain. Could be the freezing type so watch out any of you out on these roads at night. 100% Columbian for me this morning. It's a light roast and very tasty with a toasted ciabatta roll. (my latest craze)

Old Mum's got the flu it seems and she probably should have gotten the flu shot. Ain't hindsight wonderful She's got a tough constitution though and will get through it with a little of my chicken and dumpling soup.

Excellent work on the CNC machines guys. I too love machining things. My very first job back from the Mil was in a machine shop. I started on a turret lathe, then a Bridgeport (Great machine Dave!) and finally graduated to a horizontal milling machine called a Keller machine. You "rode" this bad boy up top in a chair tracing a finished part with a dummy cutter the size of the three below you. We were making wing spars three at a time for F16's. Later the machines were converted to tape drive CNC which looked like a player piano type paper roll. I was only there for a year, long enough to save some dosh for a cross country trip, but I loved the work. The place was later washed away in a flood when a dam broke but that's another story.

Might let the MO 116 burn down now and give it a clean out since the cookstove is done and it's in the 40's? Just like to see if there is much fly ash like ther was in the cookstove.

After that, I'm down to the garage and my little wood shop to fab up some inside storm windows I'd like to try out. The idea of the windows is simple. A wooden frame is made about ½ an inch smaller than the window frame it is to go in, and that frame is covered on both side with pieces of heat-shrink (polyolefin) plastic. Tape is used to cover the edge, the film is shrunk with a hair dryer, and a ½ inch foam weather striping is added around the edge. It's the open cell stuff that compresses easily and that friction holds them in place. It's abit like the "storm king" plastic film kits they use on old houses but thicker film and in a frame that is reusable. Now if they will only survive the cats!