Member postings for Zebethyal

I use a countersink bit in a manual hand drill - something Tom Lipton of OX Tools is a big fan of, anything bigger or edges, I use a Noga style deburrer.

My 6x4 bandsaw does not seem to like like cutting these days - the motor stalls very easily even on aluminium.

I also have an Evolution Rage 10" cold chop saw that was £60.00 on ebay, I recently cut a piece off a 60mm round steel bar, took no more than 30 seconds, nice clean cut.

I have also used it to slice 2mm off the end of a length of 20x40mm aluminium extrusion that was slightly too long, perfect square cut and took less than 5 seconds.

The chop saw and the bandsaw are each sat on Ikea Helmer 6 drawer cabinets which makes them easy to move about, this is much more convenient than the rubbish stand that came with the bandsaw.

I am still contemplating one of the Aldi bandsaws to replace the 6x4.

Edited By Zebethyal on 12/03/2019 08:34:05

I have a 500mm (210mm stroke) 15kg (33lb) gas spring on my SX2, bought for about £13.00 on Ebay, this allows full travel and has been mounted on both tilting and fixed column variants of my mill.

You can see it here sat alongside my Z axis scale when the mill still had a tilting column

and again with a fixed column

The Model engineering side includes building my own 3D printers, building a Laser Cutter and modifying my milling machine for CNC.

Other hobbies include:

Archery

Electronics

Photography

Not a hobby as such but seem to spend large amounts of time on DIY

Stalled hobby - my VW Beach Buggy that I used to drag race.

I take your point with regards the precision of a ballscrew compared to a rolled threaded rod from a manufacturing point of view, but am struggling with how the ballscrew provides the same or better resolution.

Assuming a standard stepper motor with 200 steps per revolution, 1/16 uStep and a gear ratio of 1:1 (direct coupled)

For an M5 threaded rod (0.8mm pitch) you have 4000 steps/mm

For an Acme 1/4-16 (1.5875mm pitch) you have 2015.75 steps/mm

A Stepstick A4988 can do 1/16 uStep and currently costs £1.00 or less on Ebay, unless you are looking at 1/32 or better uStep which will cost much much more, you are not going to beat the threaded rod for resolution.

On my Prusa i3 clone I built from a set of printed parts I have M5 threaded rod with pvc tube as a coupling and have no issues with resolution and have only twice had issues with the coupling coming loose - I have had more issues with the original printed parts failing and needing to be replaced with items that have more infill.

Edited By Zebethyal on 15/11/2018 14:09:42

You can always run it in a virtual machine on your Mac

I run a Windows 10 virtual machine under VirtualBox for apps that have no alternative on a Mac - Visio (no Mac version or real equivilent) and Golden Records (Archery records system - Windows only) being 2 of them.

VirtualBox is free from Oracle, and the Windows 10 license I bought second hand on Ebay for about £2.00 from a decomissioned machine.

I have no answer for you, but can likewise see both sides of the various arguments - I used to attend, then trade at some of the Aircooled VW shows, I never made a profit and often made a loss (usually as a result of theft). I have now ceased trading and no longer attend as a visitor - I have no interest in 'trailor queen' cars and would only be attending to meet up with some people on a club stand, that I could do for free on their club night anyway.

I have little to no interest in most of the club stands at the model engineering shows as I am not that interested in trains, planes, static models, etc. I can appreciate the level of work that has gone into them and applaud those who have put in the effort to produce these models, they are just not my cup of tea.

I mainly attend looking for second hand bargains, or a good deal on some new tooling, or some stock that would otherwise be expensive to post. But if the price being offered is the same as the trader's shop, then I may be saving some postage, but that has likely been cancelled out by the travel and ticket costs.

On the plus side I can actually see the items in person, many items when viewed on a website have little indication of scale so size can be hard to judge - as an example many wood cutting bandsaws from tiny desktop ones to 14+ inch cut all look very similar in a picture, only seeing them in person gives a real idea of their actual size.

I found the Sandown show that included the Maker area interesting - I spent twice as much time in the Maker area as the rest of the show, although even here I was looking for ideas since nobody was offering anything that I actually needed - I have built my own 3D printer and lasercutter from scratch. Looking for ideas was the same reason I used to attend the TCT show at the NEC, (which is free, but incurs the £11.00 parking fee + travel) but after the initial "wow" of the first year, it held less interest on my second year and I did not bother last year or this year - it had already lost its appeal.

I took my son to the show at Alexandra Palace a few years back, and whilst not the target audience at ten years old, the only stand that caught his attention was the Robot Wars stand that I struggled to prise him away from. He didn't come the next year, which was just as well as that stand was no longer in attendance and I would have just had him moaning at me the whole time.

As mentioned at the start I don't know what the answer is for this, or any show, I didn't want this post to come off as negative, but unless the shows can find a way of bringing back the 'wow' factor and somehow keep reinventing themselves I fear they may be doomed.

Edited By Zebethyal on 22/10/2018 14:31:51

Seth Gould is currently a resident artist at the Penland School of Crafts, this allows him to concentrate on specific items like this chest without having to worry about commissioned work.

He also teaches blacksmithing at the school and runs workshops for specific projects such as hammers or dividers.

Edited By Zebethyal on 11/10/2018 11:28:03

Zebethyal (actually Zebethyial - Demon Queen) is a character from the lesser known Red Fox comic book series. It is also sufficiently unique that it is unlikely that anyone else will have used it on any other message board.

With regards refitting, thus far I haven't - I occasionally put pieces of blue Tork hand cleaning paper over the bed to prevent too much swarf falling on and clogging the Y axis screw thread, which also makes it easy to pick up the swarf and just dump the whole lot in the bin, but mostly don't bother.

The bellows from my SX2 that have not seen much use, they were removed when I installed the fixed column and extended base in July 2015 and just sat under the bench since then, not used the Mill much inbetween as I was concentrating on House related refurbisment.

I thought about putting them back on the other month and they just ripped apart in my hands with absolutely no effort whatsoever, so this is not an isolated case.

My garage also sees some extremes of temperature - keeping anything rust free in there is a mission.

Igaging Digital Readout Bars similar to the ones you mention were one of the first upgrades I made to my SX2.

Beware of mounting the readouts near the spindle - mine had a nasty habit of resetting to zero just at the wrong moment.

I then built an interface for the Yuriy's Toys Touch DRO app and bought a cheap Android tablet to run it on - this along with some shielded USB cables turned the scales into a fully functioning DRO for not a lot of money and by far the most valued upgrade I have performed.

Cyanoacrylate glue seems to be pretty popular for smoothing PLA prints, with or without talcum powder as additional filler.

The CA can also be sanded afterwards to give an even flatter finish.

I built mine from a Dust Mite (£49.00) cyclone (this one has metal connectors) and a 30L plastic barrel (£14.50) originally used for Jam. It is small enough to be portable using the handles on the barrel and not too heavy even when full.

I use it with my Festool CTL Midi dust extractor with 50mm hoses and notice no loss of suction regardless of what I am cleaning up (including plaster dust) with very little making it through to the vacuum bag.

One thing to be aware of is that the barrel is under partial vacuum and if not strong enough to withstand this can collapse inwards.

Some filament does not seem to like a change in spool diameter and can break as a result of the new pressures.

I regularly come back to my Prusa i3 clone after periods of non use, sometimes as short as a day or two, to find that the filament between the spool and the hotend has snapped, often with a 3-6" piece having broken off and 'pinged' across the desk.

I have a length of filament in a bowden tube on my Kossel Mini that having been left for a long period of time has snapped at intervals of about 2-3 inches along its entire length from the hotend back to the extruder motor.

I also recall reading one of Richard Horne's blog posts where he had an entire spool of 3mm black PLA shatter.

Richard also has another post about a filament joiner that he uses for multi-coloured prints that he has also put on Thingiverse, he has a separate post where he posts additional information about calculating how long each coloured piece needs to be prior to joining them up.

Thanks Neil,

I have only just read the article, and did look to see if there was a previous posting regarding this issue, but did not see one - maybe I should have looked harder.

As I mentioned above, even if it had been proof read, the issues may not have been picked up as they were still valid temperatures, if a little high.

Unfortunately, I am not even sure that the thermocouple values are correct, as on reading the manual for the JLD612, it shows a K type thermocouple as -328 to 2372F or -200 to 1300C, so it looks like the preceding '-' sign has been dropped from the lower values shown for the thermocouples as well as the F and C values being transposed.

I am sure it is a printing issue, which is a shame for such a well written article, since it adds an unnecessary level of confusion.

I believe there have been a large number of typographical issues regarding the temperature values as presented in this article.

For example the K type thermocouple is described as having a range of 200-23000F or 96-12600C, where this should actually read 200-1300F or 96 - 1260C, the 'degree' symbols have been somehow become transcribed as an additional 0 throughout much of the article.

There is also an inconsistency with reporting the numbers, sometimes 400C and sometimes with a gap between the number and the C, such as 400 C, again adding to the confusion regarding the actual temperature being discussed, which in reality was only 40C.

I also appreciate that such items are not easy to pick up on any proof reading, as these are all still valid temperature values, however, in a technical article such as this one where most of the article is about precise temperature control, the values as shown are wildly misleading .

The guys who did the floor for my pre-fab garage 14' x 21' ( 4.26 x 6.4m ) did the floor in two halves and put two pieces of A142 mesh in each half. The pieces were 3.6 x 2m in size and they just lay them in fairly roughly on top of the hardcore then poured the concrete. The mesh had a small amount of overlap, but the pieces were not tied together, nor did they touch the shuttering.

Many thanks Ketan for the explanation.

As I mentioned several times, this was not a dig at you or any other supplier, merely an observation of some across the board price increases over the period that had startled me and I was having difficulties explaining them away.

If I was starting in the hobby now, rather than when I did, then my cost of entry for the same machines would be significantly greater compared to my income which has remained fairly static, as such I am unsure if I would still be able to make the leap today, and had similar concerns for others looking to join the fold.

I also appreciate that the availability and choice today is far greater than it has ever been, and I am sure we all appreciate any costs that are absorbed in order to help keep the costs down.