Small reward, big effort

For weeks, I’ve been avoiding the big pile of boxes that the restoration vapers left in the basement in front of the layout. My darling wife, understanding that neither they nor she would put everything back where it belongs, instructed them to leave the boxes. Of course, unpacking boxes takes little effort. Running the cables […]

Awesome gift under the tree

Doesn’t everyone prefer homemade gifts? This year the kids teamed up to create enough Mark II Stock Keepers to keep me quiet for a while. Mark II and Mark III (fewer staples but more labour) both enable me to reach small pieces easier than the original Mark I version, pictured here. The Girl even decorated […]

Wanted – pressure vessel

Readers of this blog will know that it is unusual for me to admit defeat. Usually, I will doggedly pursue an idea until everyone has pretty much drifted off to cat videos, except for a few readers who check back to shake their heads and mutter such things as “he had so much promise.” However, […]

Necessity invents a palette

A couple of weeks ago, as I was setting up to demonstrate at VTE, I realized I didn’t have anywhere for my puddle of glue. I normally use an old CD for this purpose, and for years AOL provided me with an almost monthly supply. I still have a lifetime of CDs ready to receive […]

Perfidious air

The past couple of weeks have been all Christmas gifts all the time, but tonight I finally managed to get few minutes to spend on my projects. With the heavy shop out of action until we rebuild from the flood, I’m reduced to the crowded garage floor for heavy shop work. I’m still working toward […]

A good effort at pressure

I’m still grappling with the problem of bubbles in my castings. The accepted wisdom indicates that you want to set polyurethane castings under pressure so the bubbles become very small. I think the Smooth-on site suggests 60 psi (413 Kia). Not having anything that holds pressure, and not wanting to spend a lot of money, […]

Vacuum chamber

My first plastic vacuum chamber for evacuating rubber Moldavia never held much pressure. For this attempt, I poked around at the local thrift store and ultimately came away with a pot and a tempered glass lid that will enable me to see what is going on inside. Until I got hold of it, there was […]

Unused tools

It’s hard to believe, but I bought this vise at the same garage sale where I got my drill press for fifty bucks fifteen years ago. For a lifetime, the drill press and vise had been part of a piano repair business, but even in 2003 nobody wanted real pianos anymore, and even fewer wanted […]

Using OnShape to create etching patterns in InkScape

I’ve been experimenting with OnShape sheet metal models to produce patterns for etching parts. Being designed for ordinary bending processes, OnShape is not directly applicable, but I think it is close enough for my purposes. Here are the sheet metal model parameters that I have found work in OnShape to produce drawings that match the […]

OnShape and etched fold lines

Due to flooding, progress on real modelling has halted, and I’ve had to move into the virtual realm. This is okay, as there is loads of drawing work yet to do on 622. I speculated a couple of months ago that some careful manipulation of OnShape’s new Sheet Metal Model feature might yield a good […]