Paying the bills...

[TomG]

I've been home all week building a fixture for a product we are developing at work and thought that I'd share the type of things I do when not doing the hobbyist thing.

The purpose of this fixture is to align a piece of mylar film with an injection molded part so the two can be laser welded together. It consists of a plate with two locating dowels to position the film, a lower assembly to hold and register the molded part and an upper assembly to hold and register a mask to block off areas that are not to be welded. In addition, there is a clamping platten built into the lower assembly that can squeeze the whole mess together with 175 pounds of force, putting the molded part and the film in intimate contact with each other. The upper assembly also has a latching mechanism that is easy for the operator to use but still able to resist the clamping force. The clamping mechanism utilizes a shuttle riding on ball bearing in angled slots to multiply the force of a pneumatic cylinder by four.

This fixture mounts on a linear slide inside an enclosure (last months project) that contains the laser, and feeds it under the laser at a steady rate to fuse the two parts together.

Tom