I brought the milling machine up to the house last Saturday. It now resides in the dining room. The controller (not pictured) is faulty, so I’m planning to retrofit it for EMC2. The second picture is of a machine that makes the charts for optical comparators. It was given to me with the mill. I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s a very high quality 2-axis machine, but it’s not rigid.
I have a coal stove in the kitchen and it occurred to me today that there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to melt aluminum in it. I didn’t have any sort of crucible, so I made one by taking a small piece of iron pipe and screwing a cap onto one end. Then I stuck a piece of scrap aluminum angle into the pipe and sat in in the coal fire:
In just a few minutes, the bottom two thirds of the aluminum angle was molten:
I used a screwdriver to push the aluminum farther down, and it melted in seconds:
I lifted the pipe-crucible out with a pair of channel locks. It was pretty hot:
Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything handy to use for a mold, so I just poured an aluminum puddle onto a fire brick:
The aluminum melted quickly and poured easily. I don’t think I spent more than 30 minutes on the whole project. I’m looking forward to making some molds.
This is an $8 digital caliper from Harbor Freight. I drilled two holes through the jaws, and the caliper was ready to mount. The scale was a bit too long, so I removed the excess with a hacksaw, and filed it down. That’s it.
I was looking at Fab@Home’s extruder design, and it inspired me to build this cookie dough extruder:
This uses the same motor as the standard reprap extruder and can be controlled by the Reprap Extruder Controller board. It works empty, but I haven’t tried it with dough yet.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks putting together a Repstrap 3d printer, based on the McWire cartesian robot. Today I ran my first test of the extruder, with polymorph plastic. At first, the plastic jammed in the drive assembly, just above the PTFE barrel. I think I either something is a bit misaligned, or I simply have the assembly too tight. Whichever the case, loosening the screws holding the assembly together fixed the problem.
Before too long, a .5mm string of plastic began flowing out the nozzle and piling up on the table:
What you need, when you need it
September 6, 2010