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Apr. 22nd, 2018 09:58 pmI'm burnt out on everything, because work is making me unhappy.
Today instead of doing things I was supposed to do (or, really, in addition to doing things I was supposed to do) I built something. One of my Ingress friends found an old scrollsaw at a garage sale, that was missing a bunch of parts to hold the work down on the table while the sawing was going on. He brought it over to see if I could come up with anything. This was about two years ago. Well, I finally came up with something. I found some drill rod to replace the hold-down arm, made an adapter that fit the drill rod and then fit a grabber arm for an old silicon wafer handler I got from hewlett packard years ago, and made a little foot out of a steel bracket from a giant power strip, and some lexan that used to be a brochure holder.
It's not yet perfect but it works pretty well.
The adapter and the hold down foot. That bolt needs to be shorter and have wings on it, as it's what sets the foot depth to match the material thickness. I really like that the lexan has a nice smooth curve on the front that allows it to ride over material, like a sewing machine foot, and I can see through it to watch the cut progressing. The steel fork reinforces it so it doesn't snap off if the blade catches or breaks and hits the bottom of the workpiece and pushes it upwards.
And I have always wanted to make a spring out of plywood.
Things I realized after making it: it's a progressive spring, much stiffer at the center. If I want a more linear spring (a closer approximation to Hooke's law) I need to have the spiral quite narrow at the center, diverging as it moves outward.
Well, that sounds like something to generate algorithmically and then feed to the laser cutter. I'll do that next.
Today instead of doing things I was supposed to do (or, really, in addition to doing things I was supposed to do) I built something. One of my Ingress friends found an old scrollsaw at a garage sale, that was missing a bunch of parts to hold the work down on the table while the sawing was going on. He brought it over to see if I could come up with anything. This was about two years ago. Well, I finally came up with something. I found some drill rod to replace the hold-down arm, made an adapter that fit the drill rod and then fit a grabber arm for an old silicon wafer handler I got from hewlett packard years ago, and made a little foot out of a steel bracket from a giant power strip, and some lexan that used to be a brochure holder.
It's not yet perfect but it works pretty well.
The adapter and the hold down foot. That bolt needs to be shorter and have wings on it, as it's what sets the foot depth to match the material thickness. I really like that the lexan has a nice smooth curve on the front that allows it to ride over material, like a sewing machine foot, and I can see through it to watch the cut progressing. The steel fork reinforces it so it doesn't snap off if the blade catches or breaks and hits the bottom of the workpiece and pushes it upwards.
And I have always wanted to make a spring out of plywood.
Things I realized after making it: it's a progressive spring, much stiffer at the center. If I want a more linear spring (a closer approximation to Hooke's law) I need to have the spiral quite narrow at the center, diverging as it moves outward.
Well, that sounds like something to generate algorithmically and then feed to the laser cutter. I'll do that next.
