Sorry guys, I am here and I am getting your pm's, but school has been quite a challenge the past few months. I spent most of my free time the first month of the semester getting the cnc mill up and running. Then the projects, presentations, and tests started to hit.
I'm in 7 classes right now. In 2 of them, I actually have to do hands on manufacturing of stuff. They expect us to just use the resources available at the university (a couple of small 3d printers, a drill press, and a band saw). However, you guys know me, I have to do things my way. There's no way with my CNC sitting in the garage that I was going to just use a drill press and a bandsaw to make anything, nor was I going to pay for access to 3d printers that aren't even really big enough to print what I need anyway.
So, I built up an enclosure for the mill when I first assembled everything, complete with flood coolant. It's not finalized yet (I still have to tram the column and get a monitor mount for the right side of the enclosure to free up my bench) but it is running. I did a few sample pieces with it a couple of months ago. Some of you may have seen my Rumplestiltskin dagger that I made on a big HAAS minimill last year. Well, for a test, I pulled up the name section in my CAM software, setup the toolpaths, and let the mill do its thing. I think it was about 6 hours with my slow spindle.
The quick and dirty (sharpie) blackwash aside, it looks pretty fantastic.
Worked on another test piece (SHH if you know what that is, don't spoil the surprise) a few weeks later when I found myself with another hour to burn.
And those were 2 weeks ago when I was beginning to manufacture the 4 bar linkage (shown completed below).
The first manufacturing project was a 4 bar linkage. You tear apart a rat trap, put the spring from it into your manufactured linkage, and it has to be able to support a weight of 6 pounds being held at any angle from -45 to 45 degrees on the other side. The lighter your arms are the better, and when the professor gave me a little bit of lip about it being too heavy if I made the base out of aluminum, I had to prove him wrong and make the entire thing lighter than the wooden base that the other students used.
I gave it a little bit of pizzazz to ensure we got all of the possible points for the appearance of the linkage (possible 10 bonus points) and we ended up getting more points for it than we were supposed to (15 bonus points). The professor wanted to keep it as an example for future years. Other students told him he could keep theirs if he needed it, and his response was "No, I don't want it." So, I think I knocked that one out of the park.
Next up is for flight class. I have to design and manufacture a new wing for a remote controlled plane, and whoevers wing carries the heaviest load with a 10 meter takeoff distance gets a full letter grade boost. The project is worth 8% of the grade regardless of whether you win. So, 2 weeks ago, we emailed the person in charge of the wind tunnel so we could test some 3d printed wings. No response for 2 weeks. In the meantime, I go by what assumptions I can, and print 4 different wings that are from 8" in span to 9.75" in span (full scale is 60" to 72"). Finally he responds and
we I go talk to him. He tells me the wings are too small, and that I should have measured the wind tunnel. Okay, sure, I'm gonna go down and take the panels off of the side of the wind tunnel that someone has their senior design project setup in, and stick a tape measure in there. Or, maybe 2 weeks ago when I asked, you could have told me the wind tunnel was 24" across.
So anyway, I'm now printing the wings at a much larger scale (18"-22" span) and it's costing me a lot of money worth of material to do it in this size (it's about $30 per wing and 50 hours on the printer times 4 wings). I can do 12" high prints, so I'm splitting the prints right in the middle and it's a very good fit to the size of this printer.
Finally, I started building an R2 over the summer. I didn't mention anything right away because I didn't want to deal with the eyerolls and the "why are you spending time on that instead of my sabers". Though to be fair, I know you guys are a pretty understanding bunch. But the reason I held it back for a while was really just because of time. I wanted to post a huge thread about it when it was done, all of the details of the build, yada yada.
So why am I telling you this now? Well, because the reason I picked "right now" to build the R2 is because this is my final year at the university. This means I needed to have a Senior Design Project to complete, give a presentation and 2 reports on, etc. So, I pitched it to the instructor for senior design. After a month of confusion about whether I needed a team or not (I didn't), I finally got it approved. So yes, I am in fact building an R2-D2 for school. I've had to submit bi-weekly progress reports since the beginning of september. And when it's done in april, I'm gonna have to log it to the school to give a presentation/demonstration.
I have all of the parts besides the feet and center ankle (don't really want to talk about why I don't have those yet) and the whole point of it being a senior design project is the retractable center leg. That's the system they want me to focus on for the project.
The 3d model is not as far as the parts I have, besides the center foot and center ankle, but I also don't have all of the current parts fully assembled. I have quite a few internal and structural bits that I have to mill, but I've been so busy with my other schoolwork that I've not had much time to work on my favorite bit of schoolwork.
All of that, and I've covered 3 of 7 classes. Right now I'm typing a presentation that I have to give on monday about the effects of temperature on the properties of aluminum vs steel, working on proving the stability of the wings I've designed for class, printing the wings so we can read our actual values for lift and drag from the wind tunnel to get our final payload numbers, and applying for graduation in the spring. I scheduled for next semester, and I've got 4 classes, 1 of which is senior design.
I haven't forgotten about anyone, and I promise, I'll get to everyone. But, the unfortunate thing about being a student is when the professors decide that I'm going to have 60 hours of homework per week, I have to prioritize that. With the CNC, I "can" do homework and do some milling at the same time, but at the moment, each toolchange takes about 5 minutes. I can get that down to about 10 seconds, but I need to spend about $2000 on toolholders to make that happen. It also isn't as simple as 3d modeling something and hitting go. You have to actually generate the toolpaths yourself. Each different type of operation with each different tool takes a few minutes to setup, and sometimes the software just doesn't want to do something correctly, so you have to fight with it for a few hours. Once you've spent a few hours setting up toolpaths (and it can be less time for simpler parts like the 4 bar linkage arms) you have to put the part in the machine, locate it, make sure everything fits the travels of the machine, put your tool in the spindle, measure the z height, adjust your coolant hose, and start the cycle. If I had the time to generate the toolpaths, I'd tough it out and do my homework in the garage while the machine ran (it's pretty uncomfortable to sit out there hunched over a book) but I just am not finding the time to be able to do that. Most of the things for the sabers on the bench are short operations too, so I'd have to man the machine changing tools and parts the whole time. Not to mention the fact that I actually have to make most of the parts on the manual lathe before putting them in the mill.
All in all, we're about 80% of the way to where we want to be. I have the cnc setup, I've learned how to use it without trashing any saber parts (since I didn't just jump right into that), and it's here at my disposal whenever I'm ready to make something. I don't need any special permission to use it, don't have to go to some obscure place, it's right outside in the shop. I invested a lot of my own money to be able to have such capabilities (you don't even want to know what that polycarbonate for the enclosure cost), and I did it all for building sabers. Being able to use it for anything else was a bonus.
As it sits, we're 3 weeks from the end of the semester (december 18th is the last possible final exam day). In that time, I've got to build this plane, write a 25 page paper on a catapult lab we did, give a 20 minute presentation (mentioned eariler), design a jet turbine, design and 3d print a tablecloth clip that can withstand a given amount of force, write a 30 page paper on desalination of water, do 8 hours of community service (same class as the 30 page paper), plus submit weekly 10 hour assignments in 3 other classes, and survive the weekly quizzes in 4 of my 7 classes.
I'm not telling you all this so you can go "oh, poor Alex, yeah, take your time, I understand" so much as that you understand I'm not just spending my time on other projects for myself or anyone else. I'd much rather be building sabers, especially this batch that's on the bench with my new CNC capabilities. The only thing I've worked on for myself is a full scale bb-8, and the only reason I've been able to do that is because with the 3d printer, you spend 15 minutes setting it up, start the print, and then the printer just goes for 60 hours. Rinse and repeat. It's much less setup to print something than to mill it, and it takes a significantly longer amount of time without having to think about it. Right now all I have is a pile of BB-8 dome parts and 2 polycarbonate hemispheres sitting in the corner of my room collecting dust. It's just been something to keep the printer running while I'm doing my schoolwork. But even for the last month and a half, I haven't printed a single new part for that project. I had some downtime and didn't have time to fix the problem, and then I had to start printing these wings.
Went ahead and cleared out my PM box. I know I owe some people some pm's, but I'm probably not going to get to that today.