Kontraptioneering!

Hey - Remember the prototype for these?

Instagram post by Hector Wilkinson • Dec 19, 2017 at 8:02pm UTC

http://www.kontraptionist.com/post/155640938774/cnc-milled-and-programmed-some-stuff-up-for-a

Two Bit Circus‏ @TwoBitCircus

May 25

“It’s a thin line between pair programming and back-seat driving.” #Multitasking Wanna join the carny family? http://twobitcircus.com/careers/ pic.twitter.com/6eqCzx4YQI

We made a cloud that rains tequila at Two Bit! This apparently is how the Mexican government thinks they’re going to convince Germans to vacation in Mexico. It looks good enough that it just might work. It uses ultrasonic atomizers bigger than anything you’ve ever seen - Like, the size of a cheesecake, and a COUPLE of them. The one in your home humidifier is about the size of a dime. We did several iterations of this, and lemme tell you… the shop smelled pretty boozy for a while, triggering mostly bad memories for our staff, and to make matters worse,  it’s not like we used the fancy stuff for testing either. 

See the cute article on IFLScience! (image above courtesy of)

There are many ways to cut metal. This way is called the Dry Cut Metal Saw which is exactly what it is. A big saw blade with carbide teeth that cuts through steel with no coolant or lubricant. It’s loud. Really loud, and it throws showers of hot burning metal shavings everywhere. It’s the less offensive sibling to abrasive saw cutting, although the metal shavings it makes are much larger, so they carry more heat, so they do a much better job of burning areas of carelessly exposed skin, and are also very effective at getting caught in socks and pockets. What it doesn’t do is fill the air with resin, aluminum oxide and fiberglass dust, which the abrasive saw does quite well. Let’s be clear. I do NOT like this saw. I also don’t like abrasive cutting either, but for really hard materials, sometimes an abrasive blade is the only way to go. For the most part, I’d much rather just use a nice horizontal band saw with coolant. It’s way more humane to the people around it, and they produce better cuts too. BUT when you’re in the middle of a parking lot, sometimes you just have to suck it up.

Today, I’m making blanks that will be machined and tapped to hold shoulder bolts and bronze bushings for a VR experience platform.  Photos of that part of the job to follow.

Decided I finally needed to get my life together and get a nice boombox.

This one features two giant JBL speakers, an 800W Behringer mixer / amp / processor / whatever, all powered by a nice 1KW pure sinewave inverter, juiced by a hefty 24V electric lawnmower battery that I converted from god awful lead-acid batteries to lovely lithium iron phosphate (originally intended for electric car conversion) 

It’s loud.

This thing loitering around the shop this afternoon - Makes the whole place shake!

According to the wikipedia:

The Bell UH-1Y Venom is a twin-engine, medium-sized utility helicopter, built by Bell Helicopter as part of the United States Marine Corps’ H-1 upgrade program. The helicopter is also called Yankee for its variant letter, Y

Fun times with runout! This is on an old 3-jaw chuck on a southbend lathe. 

Ideally, that needle would be completely still, but there’s crazy run-out. Run-out is a type of mechanical ‘out-of-whack-ness’ that is usually used to describe how much a rotating thing spins and whips around like a cookie dough mixer versus a perfectly straight rotating shaft. In this case, I put an edge finder in the lathe chuck, which by all accounts ought to be the straightest and most perfectly ground thing in the shop. To that, a dial test indicator is placed, and the lathe or whatever you happen to be testing, is turned on to SLOW. The amount of wiggle on the dial is read, in this case, it’s about 0.015″ which is a LOT for something that would ideally have less than 0.001″ of wiggle.

At this point, you take the chuck off, take the jaws out and clean the living crap out of everything, look for burrs and dings on the jaws, clean, re-assemble, and re-test and hope everything gets better. Barring that, you would need to do a whole new operation involving a tool post grinder and a whole bunch of other crap to re-grind the jaws of the chuck so that they’re properly centered. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, you can still make nice parts on this lathe, but you have to start with a new part that you remove at least as much material from as you have out-of-whack-ness (runout) and then, after that, you can’t remove the part from the chuck until you’re completely finished. Kind of makes doing operations on existing parts or doing backside operations impossible.

For those, we end up using the 4 jaw chuck and manually dialing it in, which is very time consuming, but really the only way we can achieve good results. 

Maybe some day we’ll fix it. 

I bought an electric car. I’ve had it a year, so I figure it’s high time I write about the experience.  I got the Chevy Spark EV, which is the electric version of the regular Chevy Spark. (the gas powered Spark sucks. Two days behind the wheel of a rental was enough for me.)

The electric version, on the other hand, is a savage little sleeper with gobs of torque, a low center of gravity, excellent weight distribution, and VERY impressive acceleration. Like, “How the f**k?!?” acceleration.  Merging onto the 110 freeway is actually fun instead of the usual terrifying white knuckle prayer session in most other cars.  In short, this car is a blast to drive. 

When it comes to electric, GM nailed it. In a tiny little 4 passenger hatchback, they nailed it.  Everybody else making EVs isn’t trying hard enough. Look at the Mitsubishi i MiEV. It sucks because Mitsubishi wants it to suck. GM apparently wanted to be good at making an EV, and lo and behold, it worked. I know Tesla is a thing, but since nobody can actually afford them, it’s not worth talking about. 

So why did I get the electric? Because I was SICK of working on engines. I was driving a 97 Toyota Corolla for years. I put a new exhaust in it, a catalytic converter, new belts, a new gas tank, a battery, the list goes on, all myself, in my driveway. Filth, impact wrenches, oil, gasoline, grime, stink, all of it. I got it to pass smog, and I vowed never again. I sold it to some chump for the price of my down payment on the lease for the Spark EV. Win. (for me)

So everybody wants to bitch about range. Unless you have an god-awful commute, you will be fine. This is not a car for travelling salespeople,  but think about the last time you drove 80+ miles in a stretch. It was NOT fun, and you don’t do it often. The Spark EV goes 80 or so miles, less when you run the heat. The A/C takes off some mileage too,  but not nearly as much as you’d expect. I never hesitate to crank it, plus, you can remote start the car, and if you’re plugged in, it will use power from the wall to pre-cool or heat, which is awesome.

The next thing is charging. Let me be crystal clear on this - If you can’t charge at home, you have no business owning an electric car.. Not yet anyhow. When the 200 mile cars come out in late 2016, then maybe you can think about it, but for now, if you street park, forget about it. Maybe you can charge at work, but your car spends most of it’s time at home. Now, at home, you can charge two different ways. One is with a regular old dumb wall outlet, which will give you enough for maybe 50-60 miles of driving for a regular overnight session. Most people never run their batteries flat, and to be sure, this is the slowest possible way to charge, BUT it only takes you 10 seconds to plug it in, so who cares. It’s not like you have to sit there and hold the button down.  The next way is to get a 220V charger. You can build your own or buy one for an outrageous amount of money. A 220V (and 110V for that matter) car charger is actually nothing more than a fancy hair dryer plug with a bunch of stuff to keep you from accidentally getting shocked. Nothing more. It’s ridiculous that they cost hundreds of dollars. They don’t change, regulate, or alter the power in any way whatsoever, nor will a bigger unit charge your car faster. The charger is built in to the car, and it is what it is. Deal with it. They will charge your car in about 8 hours from flat dead empty, but nobody runs their car to zero anyway, and again, it’s not like you have to sit there and hold the button down. At the end of the day, the car is cheap to charge. I figure $150 a year on my power bill. I used to spend that much in two months in gas. If I was lucky.

Let’s talk about DC fast charging! Fast chargers are giant external chargers that hook up straight to the battery and dump mind-blowing amounts of power in to your car in a very short period of time. Like, 50,000 watts. That’s enough juice to power your whole block and all their air conditioners in August. Needless to say, it tanks up your car in about 15-20 minutes. The problem is, they are expensive, and while there are a lot of them in California, there are nowhere near enough, and they’re frequently occupied, and often a site only has one or two, and if they go down, you’re screwed. You don’t get range anxiety, you get “Will this fucking Freedom Station be working?!?!” anxiety, or there’s some douche trying to squeeze the last 1% in to his car for 45 minutes. Public charger etiquette is a problem. And again, there aren’t enough of them. There needs to be a station every 10 miles along the I5 from Mexico to Canada. Maybe then there would be enough saturation that people could find open, working chargers.

It’s a small car. It only seats four. 99.5% of the time, this is fine, it’s just me and my daughter going to work and daycare. Baby 2 is on the way, and it’s tight with two car seats, but doable. Don’t expect to haul a lot with a small car. Usually people don’t haul much anyway, except excessive amounts of trash. I DID use a roof rack to move some plywood and drywall, which was HILARIOUS but perfectly fine. Again though, unless you need to haul crap around, you don’t need a big car, electric or otherwise. For big jobs, we have my wife’s car, a Nissan Rogue. Fine car, expensive to drive in comparison, but when we have long drives or vacations, the bigger car makes more sense for all the crap we need to haul. In other words, if you are a two car household, there’s no reason to have both be gas cars… unless you can’t charge at home. 

All in all, the experience of driving the Spark EV is more about driving a really speedy and fun SMALL car rather than driving an electric. The electric part is a big deal, for sure, and i do love me some silent rocket ship action, but plugging in at home and work is really the only difference in routine, and never having to stop for gas (which is awesome). I personally will never go back to a gas car. The electric car is perfectly suitable for my everyday use, and even longer trips too, and is just way to easy, smooth, and fun. 

Questions?

The Internet of Chickens. Good progress on day 5.

The chickens are dead.

A sensor malfunction doomed the four remaining eggs.

Obviously, the temperature didn’t fall to -400 degrees, nor go up to +500, but it sure did spaz out the computer. A simple reset of the Arduino brought it back in to line, only to discover that the internal temperature had reached over 120 degrees. Obviously some fail-safes are in order. 

Sadness fills the air. 

New milling machine is here!
Another Tormach, this time with a nice beautiful enclosure and beefed up motors and electronics. Looking forward to making copies fly again. It’s been WAY too long.