Posts

Posted on

Some Particularly Sad News

Readers of my pages will be aware of my involvement with Graham at Delph in helping to further develop his Gearwheel Designer program.  It seems there is a ‘gentleman’, Mr di Claudio,  who appears to have stolen the design and hacked the code.  He appears quite proud of his pirating activity.  It is a sad reflection of the times and the industry.

Knowing as I do the amount of time Graham has been putting in on his code I would recommend anyone interested in his application to do the honourable thing and subscribe the relatively small amount requested.   Without people like Graham having the innovative thought to produce such applications our hobby and indeed commercial interests would be all the poorer.

Similar or related subjects : –

Posted on

PathPilot Upgrade to Version 2.x.x

I registered with Tormach for the free upgrade to the new release 2.x.x of PathPilot.  A memory stick arrived this morning with the new code.   It is fairly complex process but their documentation is quite easy to follow and understand.

All seems to have gone well with the upgrade except I can no longer see the shared drive for dropping files into nor can I get the Dropbox feature to load.  All of which suggests the network connection is not working but I not winning so far.  Gloom but not a disaster.  Fresh eyes another day.

Similar or related subjects : –

Posted on

Ratchet Wheel Trial Cut using Gearwheel Designer

I am now running Version 21 of Gearwheel Designer and it gets better all the time.

I decided to make a ratchet wheel as my next test.  This highlighted the need to think about the process order on the mill.   Below is the design image in Gearwheel Designer.

My CNC sequence was as follows : –

  1. Cut the square brass blank a little oversize and draw a diagonals on it to show the nominal centre (Manual operation).
  2. Drill four holes in the corners outside of the working area of the cutting and use these holes to fasten down the blank to the milling table (which I had protected with a piece of MDF). (Manual operation)
  3. With a drill bit as appropriate, drill radial holes in the centre of the spoke petals and also the centre hole.
  4. Fasten the petals down to the MDF using these radial holes.
  5. Cut the gash outline of the wheel.
  6. Remove the four corner screws and remove the liberated brass outside the gash cut.
  7. Cut the rough pass on the teeth.
  8. Cut the fine cut on the teeth.
  9. Fasten down the periphery of the wheel with small clamps.
  10. Gash cut the spokes to leave the petals free from the blank.
  11. Remove the screws holding the petals and remove the brass liberated.
  12. Run the final cut on the spokes.
  13. Job done apart from a light sanding to remove any small burrs.

Some more images follow : –

Gash cut done and teeth cut twice round. The clamps are in place holding it down while the petals are cut.
Petals cut and removed for the final cut on the crossings
Finished wheel after a light papering

The purists will now tell me how it isn’t a proper wheel because the crossing interfaces to the rim have radius rather than a sharp corner.

Well a file will soon fix that …. and I can tell them how I watched another three episodes of House of Cards while this wheel was being cut.

Similar or related subjects : –

Posted on

Laser Centring Tool for Tormach Tooling System

Frustrated by not being able to use my Myford Mill Laser Centring tool on my Tormach PCNC440 I have done a redesign using Fusion 360 and 3D printing.

Tormach, Fusion360
Concept View of Laser Centring for Tormach TTS

Read about it here ……

Disclaimer : –  This post and many others on my website feature references to Tormach and its products.  I have no connection to Tormach Inc financially, commercially or otherwise.  I acknowledge that Tormach®, Tormach Tooling System®, TTS® and PathPilot® are all registered trade marks of Tormach Inc.

Similar or related subjects : –

Posted on

Sindoh 3DWOX DP200 Raft Printing Problem

My close friend in France also has a Sindoh 3DWOX DP200 3D printer.  We bought them at a similar time.  He has probably been a busier user of the machine.   He has designed and making a very complex camera mount for tracking celestial objects.  He is using an Arduino as the controller and has never written code before.  He is having fun and keeping his brain stimulated.

A few weeks ago he reported that the raft that the machine was laying down before printing objects was not uniform and had ‘holes’ in it.   The result was that the PLA being extruded for the object being printed, would droop down into the void in the raft and spoil the finish of the object while also making it hard to separate from the raft afterwards.

We swapped ideas remotely about what might be the cause and tried various tests and experiments but to no avail.

As it happened a few days ago we were travelling down into France and calling in to see him for lunch so I had a chance to see the problem first hand.   More head scratching until …. I had the printer bed in my hand near the window and the sunlight caught the surface of the plastic laminated to the metal bed.   My eye caught a slight bubble in the plastic surface where the adhesive bonding the plastic to the metal had presumably parted company.   This was the problem !   The air bubble, small though it was, was causing a discontinuity in the bed temperature profile leading to the PLA not flowing from the nozzle correctly.

We ran a print and put the object on a different area of the bed where there was no bubbling or scratches and the raft and the print were good.

New bed plate ordered ….

Similar or related subjects : –

Proudly powered by WordPress
Verified by ExactMetrics