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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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Yeah I know those two things don't go together - but they do in my case!
I had a few leaks after not running my sprinkler system for a while - one of the leaks was at the pump, where the metal housing has a threaded hole where the PVC pipe connects... I made several trips to the hardware store trying to find the right sized adapter for that hole! It was smaller than 1" and much bigger than 3/4" and I could not find anything to fit!
So I said to myself - "Hey you have a lathe that can do threads - make it yourself!"
So I figured out what pitch the threads were (with the handy thread gauge that came with my taps) and it turns out it's 12 threads per inch and a less than 1 1/4" in diameter so I used a piece of 1" PVC pipe (the thicker walled stuff) set up my gears on the lathe for 12 tpi and went to town on the PVC!
My Lathe does not have a threading dial, so I had to leave the half nut engaged - I've seen several videos about why NOT to do that (ruining the threads on the way back, etc) so my procedure was to: run the machine forward, cutting the thread - turn it off when it neared the end, crank out the cross slide a turn, then run the machine backwards (not cutting as the bit is away) dial back in to zero and then dial in the top slide for the next cut - rinse and repeat :) easy...
I had to remove it several times to try it out until I got it right, which means that I had to require the thread on the lathe - I've seen a few videos on how to reacquire the thread and in the videos they made it seem so complicated - turn this dial while turning that crank while this was that and make sure this was this etc... Ugh - I dreaded the whole procedure!
Turns out it's not all that bad- all I did to reacquire the thread was: dial in so my cutter was in the thread, half nut engaged, then I reset the dial on the cross slide to zero - that's pretty much it! :) Wrong or right it worked just fine...
So I guess the moral of this story is - Just because some guy makes something look so hard and overly complicated - check it out for yourself because maybe it's not :)