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3D Printed Planetary Gears
I wanted to try and print some planetary gears to try and make my 4th axis work better.
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RepRap - 3D Printer
Here's my journey of building a Reprap 3d Printer. Took about two weeks to get to the point where I was printing and I am still tweaking things to get good prints but it's working well enough to share :)
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Homemade Bandsaw Bearing Guides
Here's how I made my own bandsaw bearing guides from aluminum tuping and regular skate bearings - for like $20 :)
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Homemade Power Drive
Using a Parallax Propeller Proto board and a Pololu Stepper Driver - I've built a home made power drive for my lathe / mill / drill - Check it out!
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Timing Pulleys
I am working on a project for my Enco Mill Drill Lathe - it's a Power Feed driven by a Parallax Propeller and EasyDriver - part of the project involves making some Timing Pulleys to hook it all up! So this post is about the Timing Pulleys! Check out some pictures and videos!
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Latest 4th Axis
I just realized that I've never uploaded anything about my latest 4th Axis that I've thrown together - so here are some pictures and a video about it!
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I've been searching for a good 3D CAD tool for a while now and finally got around to trying out Solidworks and I just wanted to post and say that Solidworks is by far the best and easiest 3D tool I've used ever (besides Sketchup) Sketchup still rocks for large items - but Sketchup's max resolution is like .01" or something like that which just won't work for some of these small metal parts.
I've used Maya, Lightwave, Blender, Mastercam, Artcam, and some I've probably forgotten! But for the kind of stuff that I'm doing - Solidworks is perfect... large wooden parts - no problem... a bunch of wood parts in an assembly? no problem! Small metal parts, intricate parts, complicated parts? no problem!
I recently remade the woodgears air engine in Solidworks... Modelled each part, put together assemblies, and then the final assembly with mates and real physical animation (by real I mean all I really did was apply a "motor" to the flywheel and the rest is moving because of mates and the physics engine in Solidworks) this took a total of about 2 hours (for a Solidworks n00b!) not bad and I think the credit should go to Solidworks! :) It's kinda short but you get the idea :)
anyway - I'm a "sold" solidworks believer now!