In the process of creating a spoilboard for the MPCNC, I came across several lingering issues with the machine that needed to be resolved. It ended up being an opportunity to correct a bunch of broken bits, tighten up nuts and bolts that had loosened, and come to terms with an accuracy problem I had been ignoring.

This project also gave me a chance to try a new method of documentation, and learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work for my creative workflow.

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.

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. I took a few shots of the water to get my exposure times and aperture dialed in.

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.

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.

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. I tried to match the base to the dirt on the bottom fenders, which helped paint the picture of this thing rolling through the mud during a battle.

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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. My recent Schreck Tank cast seemed like a good candidate to test this out.

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. Sometimes this is desirable, in the case of the hex base seen above. However, the tank base and turret have detail on both the top and the bottom, and the only way to preserve this detail is with a two part mold.

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.

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.