(no subject)
Jul. 8th, 2018 10:23 amIt is every meal features squash from the garden season.
Breakfast was chopped potatoes, squash, sausage, and green bell pepper with a bunch of egg scrambled into it when hot and some cheese added in.
Yesterday I spent a bit of quality shop time on the burnout oven. I tore out the remaining old analog control system, spliced two breaks in the nichrome heating element (ya know, at some point you realize you can in fact fix anything if you want to), replaced the relay that transduces the control signal to switching the fifteen amps at 120 volt power, and tuned the controller a little bit. Now I get a nice fast heat increase (I believe nine times as fast as it was before, because parallel resistance) with excellent control, so it sat at 250C plus or minus half a degree for two hours burning out the 3d print. As a result, I got a mold that has no debris in it (I can see down in) and almost no cracking, using just plaster of paris. I'd previously been cutting it with sand, which makes everything more difficult as the sand separates out during mixing. (Not the worst: the mold is down in the bottom where it's more sand.) I found when pouring this mold that when the air temperature is above body temperature plaster of paris sets REALLY FAST. I can't mix it fully and expect it to still be pourable. So I'm mixing small batches fast and pouring those in. I need to move to real investment that jewelers use, because there is absolutely no way I can vacuum-degas this, with as fast as it's setting.
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altamira16's birthday party yesterday I met a charming young man who lives quite near where I work. His job is writing software for vision sytems for autonomous vehicles, so he was kinda thrilled by my stories about the smart headlight we're building at work. But his main interest is in acquiring a big machine shop. Since he has money and lives in a field in the middle of nowhere, he's built himself a workshop the size of a house, so we spent a bunch of time scheming about the stuff he could put in that workshop. If I'm really lucky and help some, I may get occasional access to Real Equipment.
Breakfast was chopped potatoes, squash, sausage, and green bell pepper with a bunch of egg scrambled into it when hot and some cheese added in.
Yesterday I spent a bit of quality shop time on the burnout oven. I tore out the remaining old analog control system, spliced two breaks in the nichrome heating element (ya know, at some point you realize you can in fact fix anything if you want to), replaced the relay that transduces the control signal to switching the fifteen amps at 120 volt power, and tuned the controller a little bit. Now I get a nice fast heat increase (I believe nine times as fast as it was before, because parallel resistance) with excellent control, so it sat at 250C plus or minus half a degree for two hours burning out the 3d print. As a result, I got a mold that has no debris in it (I can see down in) and almost no cracking, using just plaster of paris. I'd previously been cutting it with sand, which makes everything more difficult as the sand separates out during mixing. (Not the worst: the mold is down in the bottom where it's more sand.) I found when pouring this mold that when the air temperature is above body temperature plaster of paris sets REALLY FAST. I can't mix it fully and expect it to still be pourable. So I'm mixing small batches fast and pouring those in. I need to move to real investment that jewelers use, because there is absolutely no way I can vacuum-degas this, with as fast as it's setting.
At
altamira16's birthday party yesterday I met a charming young man who lives quite near where I work. His job is writing software for vision sytems for autonomous vehicles, so he was kinda thrilled by my stories about the smart headlight we're building at work. But his main interest is in acquiring a big machine shop. Since he has money and lives in a field in the middle of nowhere, he's built himself a workshop the size of a house, so we spent a bunch of time scheming about the stuff he could put in that workshop. If I'm really lucky and help some, I may get occasional access to Real Equipment.
