Todays Project - What did you do today?

[Kennyv]

quick lil fix SS Scribe...  im tryning to sell an 18"  veneer height gauge on flea bay had no bites bc it did not have a scribe. So yesterday at lunch cut Pc stock /  layout  stayed an Hr after work machined free hand this scribe took new pics and bam  re listed . Bout the only thing i have done since Dec  boy i sure miss my Garage being able to fiddle  round in.

[f350ca]

The neighbour offered me a 100+ foot roll of armoured cable. Looked like it might make a good feed for 50 amp service to the blacksmith shop. We dug it out today, literally, the ends were buried in the ground. To our amazement it wasn't cable in the armour but 8 small plastic tubes and two telephone sized wires.


Any idea what it would have been, pneumatic  control cable of some sort?

[Vinny]

If it was a non-metalic armored cable, the telephone wires were tracers for the cable and the tubes were probably intended to be fiber optic conduits. In another lifetime I attended a seminar for ATT and Graybar Electric on fiber optic cabling. They said the tracers were added after some company buried over 1000 miles of fiber optic cable without the tracer and had to find a break in it. Turned out some farmer cut it with a backhoe.

[TomG]

Finished up a little project at work today that I've been working on for a month or so. It's a manufacturing tool for producing a disposable used in one of our products. The disposable is a standard 96 well microplate (talking biology here) that has microscopic scribed lines on it used as reference points for an instrument we build. The lines are about 5 microns wide (.0002"), three on one axis and one on the other, and cross in the center of each of the 96 wells. They are produced by dragging a ceramic blade across the surface of the plastic plate at precise intervals. I built the first pair of these monstrosities about ten years ago, and production has grown to the point where manufacturing can't keep up, so I did a redesign to include faster, more modern motor controls and an overall larger frame. These two scribers should increase production by about 70% and eliminate the aging and troublesome electronics in the old devices. I don't get involved in electronics and programming that much, but all the usual suspects were too busy, so I took on the project myself. The mechanicals were easy. It's just a carriage with a fence (not shown in the video) to hold the microplates (8), riding on 1" diameter Thompson linear shafting and driven by a large stepper motor via a timing belt. The frame to support everything was made up of 3"X6" 6061 rectangular tubing. The scribing mechanism itself is being reused from the old devices to save time. It is basically a THK linear slide holding a ball bearing pivot with and arm to hold the blade and a rotary solenoid to lift it. It also has a damping mechanism that I designed that uses eddy currents from a ring of rare earth magnets acting on an aluminum disk. It helps to prevent chatter as the blade drags across the plastic surface. The stepper motor controls and the software to run them are from Applied Motion and they work very well. They each have a 100 line program capacity and are responsible for different axes. I made the one for the Y axis a master and the X axis or carriage control is the slave. They are linked together via inputs/outputs in a handshaking arrangement. Basically the Y axis control is responsible for the line spacing on the plates and the X axis control moves the carriage when the blade is in position. It's pretty cool watching the two separate programs communicate with each other on the computer screens. The computers are just for writing and debugging the programs. Once that is done, programs will live in the controllers and the scribers will be stand alone.

Anyway here's a little video showing the one of them in action. The whole debugging thing went much better than expected. I loaded the programs yesterday and had it all working as advertised by lunch time today. I did have one of the software dudes help solve a couple of stubborn issues, but overall it went very well. In the video, the red button has three purposes. A short press homes the X and Y axes, and a long press starts the scribing cycle. The toggle switch selects rows or columns on the plate. The 8 rows each have a single line in the center of the wells and the 12 columns each have three lines spaced .11mm apart. A third press of the button during the scribing cycle will interrupt the program and park the blade at home.

Tom

[Vinny]

Cool!!

[pepi]

The forum always amazes me with the talent seen from the members.

[DaveH]

That's impressive Tom  
 
DaveH

[EdK]

I bet that was a fun project for you. Nicely done.

Ed

[TomG]

Thanks guys. I broke it all down this morning and took a put a DA finish on to make it pretty. It'll be going out for anodizing next week. Spent the afternoon writing an operators manual for it.

Tom

[Mayhem]

Haven't really gotten much done of late.  Just trying to clean up and organise a few more things.  I thought however that I'd share some pics of the latest edition to the family:

   
   

He's a 10 year old Staffy x Ridgeback who I adopted from a family where he wasn't getting much attention.  I've had him about a month now and he is starting to settle in.  It must have been quite a shock to move from a small family house in the suburbs, to a larger block up in the hills.  The local wildlife spooks him every now and then.

He is very energetic and active for a dog of his age and loves coming into the shop with me.  He just goes and lays on that piece of cardboard and chews on his toy.  Extremely well natured and well behaved.