Router Upgrade
After a few years of rebuilds, teardowns, and tool changes, I am finally adding a router to my MPCNC. I have been wanting to work more with sheet material like wood, acrylic, and even aluminum if I can get the hang of using this tool.
Antares Launch
This weekend, I got a chance to see the Antares rocket take off from Wallops Flight Facility. The facility is on the Atlantic coast of Maryland, and I am roughly 50 miles away on the west side of the Chesapeake. The mission was a resupply to the International Space Station, carrying cheese, nitrogen, and other essential items.
Camera Setup My wife and I got out there early enough to get my camera setup, a simple tripod holding a Canon T3i with a 55-250mm zoom lens.
Image Scaling With Python
This blog is built using Hugo, a static website generator designed for quick build times and easy deployment. A static website requires no server backend, since everything is delivered in a static state to the reader (that’s you!). All code is executed on the client machine. I love the lightweight simplicity of a static website, which brings up some nostalgia for the internet of the mid to late 90s, when these types of pages were the norm.
Goin' Walkabout and DSLRs
This past week has been a bit slow. I have been preoccupied with a lot of work-related things, and was not in much of a mood to work on the usual hobbies of painting/printing/casting. While I may not have created too much, I spent a lot of time this week taking walks in the neighborhood. I suppose I could say this created a clear headspace from which to move into the next week.
Painting Minis and More Casting
This has been a week with a lot of painting, a little casting, and a bit of thinking about future projects.
Painting Finished Tank Early in the week, I was able to wrap up my Schrek tank build, which gave me a chance to get some experience in basing. The base seen above was the third iteration, where I finally got the spacing between the dirt piles right. This allowed the tank sat on the base instead of floating above the rocks.
Magnets, Casting, and Real Hobby Paint
It’s been a pretty productive week, and I got a chance to try out a bunch of new things and get some ideas for future projects a bit outside my norm. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to this week:
Magnets, Painting with Vallejo, and Basing To make my growing Battletech collection a bit more modular (and to keep from making/buying too many minis) I have been toying with the idea of swappable turrets and weapons for my pieces.
Two Part Mold Making
Today, we’re going to take a 3d printed tabletop miniature and replicate it with a two part mold. This will speed of production of a part that would normally take two to three hours, and give us the freedom of different materials and colors.
Two part molds allow us to cast more complex shapes than a one part, or open-face, mold. This open face creates a flat surface on the piece we are making.
Needle Cutter Rebuild
After a hiatus, I decided to revisit the needle cutter and get back to making planes from the free svg plans on FliteTest. I wanted to characterize the performance of the MPCNC and develop a streamlined workflow for creating parts that would fit together snug without being too tight.
Vacuum Table and Needle Cutter
In my pursuit of speeding up my RC plane building, I found a new tool on the Flite Test forums, a needle cutter. This is a simple tool where a flexible piece of music wire is attached to a brushless motor to repeatedly puncture soft materials. When these punctures are spaced close enough, it acts as a cutting tool.
Laser Engraver Testing
With the laser up and running, I wanted to try and dial in the settings to get good engravings and cut through some material. Most laser cutters are of the CO2 variety, which operate an order of magnitude faster than the MPCNC, and with two orders of magnitude more power.
There are lots of forum posts about setups similar to mine, but no two machines are alike, so I had to figure out my own parameters.