#MikesElectricStuff recommends some fast-turnaround #PCBA companies in the #UK: <https://hcd-electronics.co.uk/> which he used to use and <https://www.fringeelectronics.co.uk/> (not fast), plus <https://www.ablcircuits.co.uk> (which he hasn't tried) and <https://www.pcbtrain.co.uk/> (“nearest thing UK has to JLC, but at much higher prices”). Also a discussion thread about how to qualify suppliers and reduce BOM delays. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03#EEVBlog #video about PCB #manufacturing #toread. #electronics #hardware
on 02026-09-03#Usagi-Electric #video #toread discussing #JLCPCB #pricing having higher shipping costs now for #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03another Chinese #PCBA #electronics #hardware #manufacturing company, Longjiang Circuit.
on 02026-09-03a report from July that #JLCPCB and other #PCBA houses have raised their prices for 500-board runs 30% since “a couple of months ago” (≈April), presumably due to the #Iran war. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03#Video by #Eurocircuits about #manufacturing 4-layer PCBs. They do PCB manufacturing, specialized in small prototype runs, but I don’t think they do PCBA like Aisler, JLC, or PCBWay. They do “order pooling” like JLC: they put multiple customers’ designs into a single panel. #toread #electronics #hardware
on 02026-09-03People on the EEVblog forum in 02021 reported that, although #JLCPCB supports a MOQ of 5 boards for #PCBA, some of the parts they can assemble with it have a higher MOQ. “For that particular part, the minimum quantity is 15. You must pay for 15, even if they only need 5 or 10 to assemble your boards.” There’s also an “attrition” amount for some parts, which is the number of parts they lose off the tape when they cut it (and you pay for). #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02026-09-03#Jonesy-Makes #video of restoring a Victorian-era ruling engine for #machining rulers on brass or possibly steel. #manufacturing #history #metrology
on 02026-08-25#video on #manufacturing clay #ceramics jar lids to be lapped with carborundum paste so they fit perfectly.
on 02026-08-24#Concept-Crafted-Creations #video about #manufacturing the #solar-energy collector based on the James Webb Space Telescope with 18 mirrors costing US$5 each. Explains that the JWST uses gold so it can do better infrared imaging. He made some small concentrating mirrors by letting heated plexiglas discs sag into a mold made with #3D-printing, which seems like an interesting technique for #optics in its own right, though possibly not imaging optics. Rather than for the final solar concentrator, this was used for a goofy invalid experiment to compare “silver” and “gold” which were represented by colored spray paint, and the “#energy” gathered was measured by some unknown kind of light sensor #electronics. For his big collector, he used not just 3-D printing but also #laser-cutting on wood and assembly with screws. He also used a laser-cut alt-azimuth wood base with a giant gear for #solar tracking. He explains the three-point screw-and-compression-spring mounting that makes each of the 18 mirrors alignable, using TPU accordions for the compression springs; the mirrors themselves are laser-cut plexiglas with reflective window film stuck to it. He was hoping to sag these plexiglas hexagons into a mold in the same way as for the small test mirrors, but his microwave oven (which must be what he used for the others) damaged the window film, so he ended up heating them to only 100° or 120° and clamping them into a mold (with a laser-cut custom clamp) instead of just letting them sag under their own weight. His aluminum collector plate with coolant grooves running through it cost him US$171 for #PCBWay to custom-machine, making this a very expensive solar collector, though he thinks it’s cheap. Also he’s in the Netherlands, where it’s cloudy a lot, especially in winter. Comments mention that blackening copper with liver of sulfur makes a good solar-collector material.
on 02026-08-15#video on #manufacturing smoky quartz or amethyst #materials from quartz using an electron beam
on 02026-08-12#Video on different ways to use fire in the shop, such as flame cutting steel, bending steel tools, unbending bent-up pieces of steel, expanding frozen nuts, heat-treating steel, welding, fire-finishing wood with a weed burner, starting a fire in the fireplace, lighting a coke forge, etc. Annoying #clickbait title. Reasonable #manufacturing beginner #tutorial.
on 02026-08-1127' #Applied-Science #video about copper atomic layer deposition #manufacturing #toread
on 02026-08-11#video of #manufacturing a small PCB transformer for #electronics
on 02026-08-10In Germany, Makerspace Garching and MakerSpace München, operated by Unternehmertum MakerSpace GmbH, have a lot of very interesting industrial machines for #manufacturing things. But they cost like US$100 a month to join.
on 02026-08-10#USA #manufacturing #statistics on #batteries: skyrocketing to 240 (240 whats?) since 02020, when it had dipped to 65. It turns out that this is 240% of the index year of 02017, seasonally adjusted.
on 02026-06-15“The resulting [barium titanate (BTO)] parts are polarized using a poling field of 10 kV/cm, a poling time of 50 min, and a poling temperature of 60 °C, which yields a piezoelectric device with a high #piezoelectric constant of 211 pC/N.” #manufacturing #paper #toread #electronics
on 02026-05-27#Aisler #pricing for #electronics #manufacturing is a €14.00 job fee plus €0.13 per cm² (times the number of boards, MOQ 3) for “4 Layer 1.6mm ENIG Budget”. So three 100mm × 100mm boards would be €53. 2 Layer 1.6mm HASL Budget is the cheapest, €12.00 + €0.067 per cm². But that’s just for the PCBs; they offer assembly services but don’t publish any pricing information.
on 02026-05-20"Aisler" is a German (and Dutch?) equivalent to JLCPCB or PCBWay, doing #PCBA, one of the ones available from Kitspace. #electronics #manufacturing
on 02026-05-20#video on difficulties of #manufacturing in “America” (but he’s so provincial he means the #USA). Specifically a knit sweater, made by “our knitting partners”, who blamed the yarn spinners, who furiously blamed the knitters, but were wrong. So he bought yarn from overseas and asked NCSU’s Wilson College of Textiles for help, but still doesn’t know enough to explain in the video what was wrong with the yarn. This was pretty boring but would be interesting if he knew something about #fiber-arts.
on 02026-05-19#video of someone recreating #Gelbart’s bending brake. #manufacturing #toread
on 02026-05-19#Xyla-Foxlin #manufacturing a wooden dress for the Met Gala in 150 hours. #fiber-arts #toread #video
on 02026-05-17#Blondihacks #video #toread about #machining a tool sharpener (conclusion). #manufacturing
on 02026-05-15A site that purportedly compares the #pricing of PCB #manufacturing services from 17 contract manufacturers: AISLER, AIVON, ALLPCB, Bittele (7pcb), Elecrow, Eurocircuits, JLCPCB (EasyEDA), Lion Circuits, NextPCB, OSH Park, PCBCART, PCBgogo, PCBJOINT, PCBWay, ShenZhen2U, Smart Prototyping, U&I (quickturnpcb). 9 of these (AISLER, ALLPCB, Bittele (7pcb), Elecrow, NextPCB, PCBCART, PCBgogo, PCBWay, ShenZhen2U) do assembly too. #electronics
on 02026-04-29#video #toread by #This-Old-Tony about thread milling on a CNC mill. #manufacturing
on 02026-04-28#video of recycling aluminum in a home bucket charcoal forge with a fire extinguisher crucible. #manufacturing #hoarding
on 02026-04-27#Asianometry #manufacturing #history #video about numerical control, apparently unaware of cam-operated screw machines and consisting almost entirely of historical photos with a voiceover.
on 02026-04-27#video from #Artisan-Makes about #manufacturing heat-treated steel parts in O1, W1, HSS, or case-hardened steels, focusing on misconceptions people have
on 02026-04-26#video from #Laney-Tech showing #manufacturing process of case hardening 1018 steel from 10 HRC (Rockwell C) with broken-up charcoal briquettes. “After 8 hours at 1700° [Fahrenheit] [930° in real degrees] the carbon should penetrate one sixteenth of an ‘inch’ [1.6mm].” It reaches 60–62 HRC after reheating and quenching, 58–60 HRC after tempering.
on 02026-04-25#Ford CEO says #EVs from #China would be "devastating" to #USA car #manufacturing.
on 02026-04-22#video on #manufacturing a copy of NurdRage’s tritium-vial-powered power source with two amorphous solar cells from Digi-Key (11-AM-1456CA-DGK-E-ND), a pocket nuclear power plant. He measures the current by charging up an 11μF electrolytic, getting about 2.2V after about 10 minutes, which works out to about 40nA and on the order of 40-50nW. Open-circuit voltage seems to be about 2.8V when it’s cold in the morning.
on 02026-04-20“This location [Spruce Pine, North Carolina] is vitally important as it is claimed to be “the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.”” Extra pure silica. #manufacturing
on 02026-04-15#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #manufacturing a #jugaad #cooling setup with phase-change thermal #energy-storage in a bucket of ice with copper-tube heat exchange loops in it, one for a water and ethylene glycol coolant and one for an R600 vapor compression refrigeration loop. #solar #energy #solar-energy
on 02026-04-14#Thought-Emporium #video on #manufacturing hardened iron #materials by case-hardening with charcoal, nitriding with potassium nitrate and chloride, or cementation with charcoal followed by forge-welding it into pattern-welded steel. Attempts at plasma nitriding failed. Unfortunately the video contains a lot of filler stock footage.
on 02026-04-14#video of pick-and-place #electronics #manufacturing machine depositing solder paste #toread
on 02026-04-12#manufacturing an improved (?) cyclone separator for removing dust from air with #3D-printing. Reports that the clear PVC he used for his outer air duct is much nicer to work with (with a table saw) than other clear plastics. He has a filter bag following these separators in case they don’t catch everything. 95+% of the dust gets caught by the separators. His filter bag has a clear flexible window sewn into it so you can see it fill up! #video #mechanisms
on 02026-04-11more about poling #piezoelectric ceramics in #electronics #manufacturing, this time from COMSOL, which is maybe a more disinterested source. But, unlike the American Piezo piece, it doesn’t actually explain what you do to pole them.
on 02026-04-10how #piezoelectric ceramics are “poled” in #electronics #manufacturing. “The poling process itself involves applying a high DC electric field to the components for a specific length of time while the part is held at a given temperature. Typical DC voltages are on the order of 2000 volts per mm of component thickness. The effect of elevated temperature, usually resulting from performing the poling process in a heated dielectric fluid bath, is to make it easier to “switch or align” the domains.”
on 02026-04-10#news from February: “#Micron Celebrates Opening of #India’s First Semiconductor Assembly and Test Facility” in #Gujarat. But not a fab: “converts advanced DRAM and NAND wafers from Micron’s global #manufacturing network into finished #memory and storage products”.
on 02026-04-10#video #toread on #3D-printing variable-pitch rotors for #flying a large, high-efficiency quadcopter. #manufacturing #drones
on 02026-04-07"Process corners" for integrated-circuit #electronics design and #manufacturing
on 02026-04-06#video from #Inheritance-Machining of #manufacturing a T-handled tap wrench with a collet that grabs taps of three different sizes and a square drive so you can pull out the T-handle and put a big tap wrench on it for more torque.
on 02026-04-06#news #video #interview with MIT dropout #Ethan-Thornton of #Mach-Industries from 7 months ago. He suggests that priority targets for swarms of #drones would be cellphone towers, high-voltage transformers, and cranes in ports, in order to “stop your industrial machine”, war crimes similar to those Trump is threatening in Iran this week. Shows Stratus (balloon-based), Viper, and Glide. Thornton envisions coming out with new models every 6 months or every year, a sharp contrast to the one-week roundtrip touted in Ukraine. He’s also very focused on decentralizing #manufacturing because he expects it to be a target in war. #weaponry
on 02026-04-04Allen Pan #humor #video #manufacturing goofy nonlethal #weaponry like a “bola gun”.
on 02026-04-04archive of https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transformers/ #news about how #manufacturing of #transformers is a bottleneck for electrifying... the world? Somehow I doubt that; it seems like the kind of problem China is good at solving. The article mentions the UK, the #USA, Europe, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, before getting to China, where the vast majority of electrification is happening, and then says, “China, on the other hand, has been growing transformer manufacturing for years that feeds both its growing domestic electricity demand and rising export needs.” Also microgrids don’t need the kind of giant transformers that require a lead time of a year. And Bloomberg’s reporting here is plagued with false statements of fact, claiming that all transformers are at least as big as a household trash can, and that “a quirk of history” made the grid dependent on them, namely that Edison lost the War of the Currents. #politics #energy
on 02026-04-03#video on #manufacturing a cast-iron wrench with lost-PLA casting in waterglass sand with a microwave kiln. It broke when he tried to use it. As usual #Shake-the-Future suffers from a significant amount of talking-head filler.
on 02026-03-14#video #toread about double-walled glass #manufacturing with teflon paddles and whatnot
on 02026-03-07#video #toread where #Mr-Electron suggests #DIY #manufacturing of a 20kWh “lifetime battery” which is apparently encased in concrete?
on 02026-01-14#video #toread on #DIY #manufacturing of aluminum-air #batteries
on 02026-01-14#Murray-Smith #video #toread on #DIY #manufacturing of metal-air #batteries
on 02026-01-14Maxim #Kachurovskiy on #FreeCAD for #manufacturing after 6 years in Fusion 360. #video #toread
on 02025-12-18Maxim #Kachurovskiy on #manufacturing a concrete lathe for #machining with #3D-printing the molds, part 2. #video #toread
on 02025-12-18Maxim #Kachurovskiy on #manufacturing a concrete lathe for #machining with #3D-printing the molds, part 1. #video #toread
on 02025-12-18#optics #precision #manufacturing #video on making things flat. Like, optically flat: 50nm peak to valley, 1nm RMS. With a “planetary polisher” or “continuous pitch polisher”, which rotates a huge pitch lap underneath a “bruiser plate,” ideally made of something like Zerodur, carrying the blank or blanks. Helpfully explains that the grooves in the pitch lap prevent aquaplaning, just like the grooves in a car tire #tread. In order to avoid having to run his machine continuously, using a many-pole #brushless motor obtained from #hoarding a washing machine, he uses a very high-viscosity pitch (100× more than normal) in a very thin layer, which he initially flattens with a granite plate for 15–20'. His pitch lap is supported on five rollerblade wheels, and he controls motor speed with a VFD. Matching the angular velocity of the lap and the blank results in constant grinding across the surface.
on 02025-12-17woodworking #video about sand or salt in glue, cupping panels, battery adaptors, etc. #manufacturing
on 02025-12-10#Cylo #video of diamond-turning a mirror after initial rough milling. #optics #manufacturing #toread
on 02025-12-1041' #video #toread on laser #welding #manufacturing with the xTool, which looks very impressive indeed
on 02025-11-28#manufacturing custom keyboard keycaps with “water slide paper”
on 02025-11-11#manufacturing front panels for #electronics with “water slide paper” and other options
on 02025-11-1135' #video on #manufacturing terrifyingly realistic sex dolls, eyelash by eyelash, at Dongguan Qianyou Silicone Technology Co., Ltd.
on 02025-11-03#woodworking #video by #Wandel about #manufacturing woodworking tapered blind mortise-and-tenon joints #toread
on 02025-10-21#DIY #vacuum #video with a thick sheet of polycarbonate on top of a pressure-cooker pot with a silicone cooking mat as a gasket, tapping the hole in the polycarbonate using vise-grips as the tap wrench, drilled and tapped to match whatever your vacuum gauge hose fittings want. An O-ring compressed between a flange on the hose fitting and the polycarbonate surface by the tightening thread on the hose fitting provides the seal to the hose fitting. Doesn’t even damage the pressure cooker. But it’s not very DIY in the sense that he’s using a refrigeration vacuum pump to make it work, which is a bit like building an entire automobile starting with just some scrap metal, hand tools, and a Volkswagen Beetle. #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02025-10-21#NFTI #video #toread about #manufacturing camping teardrop foamie trailers out of XPS #foam #materials
on 02025-10-21Maxim #Kachurovskiy’s #video of #manufacturing a concrete lathe "NanoEls" with #3D-printing for #machining. Except that he also bought some machined aluminum parts from #JLCPCB CNC. Includes open-source (?) G-code control thing that consumes STL files. He regrets not leaving two channels in the base to post-tension the concrete with M12 threaded rod and not vibrating the concrete enough to get the bubbles out.
on 02025-10-21#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #bootstrapping/#manufacturing a #DIY #jugaad CT-scan #tomography #radiography machine (using a donated dental #X-ray machine and an “intensifier screen”) and #3D-printing the results. He triggers his phone’s camera app with a spring-loaded pin controlled by an Arduino-triggered relay. Lowest power setting is 60kV, 4mA. He hacks the images with the GIMP to get reasonable grayscale, then feeds them into the open-source “3D Slicer” to try to do computed tomography, but it didn’t actually do tomography, just meshing once you’ve already done the tomography, so he used a “cone-beam backprojection tool by Stanislav Maslan” for that. The result is pretty noisy but he can 3-D print it. He scans a frozen dead rat, a star-shaped squash, a frozen sardine, and a large fish head.
on 02025-10-20#Hyperspace-Pirate #video on #bootstrapping/#manufacturing a #DIY #jugaad #X-ray #radiography machine #toread
on 02025-10-20apparently "Plasti Dip" is a goo you can dip metal parts in to quickly add a non-slip rubberized coating, “usually used in adding grip to hand tools”. I guess it’s like dissolved in some kind of solvent that evaporates? #manufacturing #materials #video
on 02025-10-18#video #toread about #Giertz #manufacturing a coffee table that transforms into an ottoman for her boyfriend’s feet.
on 02025-10-18#manufacturing fake leather #materials from orange peel #video (Susana Jurado, Elisenda Jaquemot, Nuria Bonet) from 20g wool, 5 ℓ water, 135g sodium alginate, 421 g (?!) glycerin, 56g coconut oil, an undisclosed quantity of calcium chloride, and I guess orange peel as a filler, but only 120g of it (maybe that’s the dry weight because it looks like it’s about 2–4 oranges, and they do run it through a dehydrator before grinding it to sawdust and sifting). The wool is added in hunks after 24 hours, and then the calcium chloride is sprayed on the top and bottom before drying 3–7 days. Fab Lab Barcelona, part of the SISCODE project.
on 02025-10-18#Cesar #video #toread about bluing (“pavonado”) with burnt oil. He cleans it with thinner to degrease it before hanging it in a plumber’s blowtorch flame with baling wire to heat to 500°–600°, then quenches it in used motor oil from a mechanics’ workshop. #jugaad #manufacturing
on 02025-10-18#Giestas #video on #manufacturing cork-filled-agar-soled sandals using a corrugated-sole mold made from corrugated cardboard. The cork came from diced wine corks ground in a coffee grinder and sifted with a kitchen sifter to separate into cut, coarse, medium, and fine grades. 3 parts glycerin plasticizes 4 parts agar. A tiny amount of charcoal, ground in a mortar, is an additional filler for color. #Casting the heavily filled gloop in the cardboard mold looks fiddly. Used-tea-leaf tannin colors the alginate “leather” straps: 1 part alginate, 2 parts glycerin, 30 parts brown water, apparently by volume. The leather is crosslinked with a spray of 1 part CaCl₂ in 10 parts water. A box cutter tracing a masking-tape strap model tested over a sock cuts out the straps, which fit between the bottom sole and a lighter “midsole” made with 3 parts agar to 2 parts glycerin filled with coarser cork. Then the upper sole (insole) is softer, 1 part agar to 1 part glycerin filled with fine cork pigmented with mortar-ground tea leaves. Baked 1 hour at 100° with the fan on. #materials
on 02025-10-18#Giestas #video on #manufacturing an egg-shell-filled bioplastic bowl: 100mℓ water, 10mℓ glycerin, 15g agar, 2 drops clove oil, 100g eggshell (membrane removed, soapy-water-cleaned, oven sterilized, ground with mortar and pestle). So I guess the product is about 80% eggshell. He uses two glass bowls as the mold for #casting the thicker bowl. #materials
on 02025-10-18#video by #Giestas on #manufacturing a cup from used coffee grounds by binding them with agar and honey, melted in a double boiler before stirring in the grounds, then pressing the soft mass into a three-part mold made with #3D-printing, about 1cm thick. It suffers cracking damage from wetting/drying cycles. Oil of wintergreen to prevent mold, and he makes a planting pot. Relative quantities of honey, agar, oil of wintergreen, and coffee grounds are not disclosed. #materials
on 02025-10-18#manufacturing small articles from superglue, and baking soda, in blu-tack molds? Repeating thin alternating layers of superglue and baking soda (he says “baking powder” but I suspect he’s confused) work best. Round-trip time is very quick, only a couple of minutes. At first I thought he might be using fillers but actually he just painted the parts after #casting. The process of removing the form from the blu-tack introduced noticeable distortion into the overall shape. #video
on 02025-10-18#pottery-to-the-people video about soaking #amigurumis in clay slip for #manufacturing #ceramics. Bisque firing in an electric kiln to get a super lightweight amigurumi duck, then dipping in glaze and painting some on (and breaking off the fragile feet). It looked a lot better before glazing.
on 02025-10-01#video by #Malawey on #manufacturing with #8020 and similar aluminum T-nut extrusions. He prefers the Automation Direct brand. 30×30mm has pricing of US$15/meter (M6 fasteners ideal, or M8 for the end holes, 9mm groove depth), 20×20 US$8/m (M5 fasteners ideal, or M6 for the end holes, 7mm groove depth), 35mm DIN rail US$5.20. He cuts them with wood-cutting blades on wood saws, although his "wood blade" looks like it has a brazed-on insert on each tooth, presumably tungsten carbide, and it appears to say “CARBIDE TEETH / DIENTES DE CARBURO / DENTS DE CARBURE”, so it could probably cut concrete. He recommends putting some wax on the blade to make a cleaner cut, by cutting a bar of wax together with the aluminum. He reports that it is also possible to get a clean cut on cut magnesium #materials with a saw this way. He warns that “V-groove” extrusions are needed for rolling V-groove wheels on. Sometimes your screws contact the bottoms of the grooves because they’re too long, which can be remedied with a thick washer. For wheels he recommends #3D-printing a bracket to hold a rollerblade wheel. He spends several minutes demonstrting how to use SolidWorks to design such things by pretending they’re weldments.
on 02025-09-29#Clough42 #video on #precision #manufacturing via #3D-printing, specifically, his filled ABS system (“eSUN ABS+”) shrank by about one part in 300, which ended up being half a millimeter in a 151-mm screw hole spacing part. He measures the hole distance with gauge pins and digital calipers by averaging the outside-of-pins distance with the inside-of-pins distance. “Typical ABS has over 0.8% shrinkage rate. ABS+ is less than 0.4%,” but actually he measured about 0.58% (5800ppm, or about 73ppm/°, assuming the part is at 100° while printing). His proprietary slicer Simplify3D has an option in Tools→Options→Models→Import actions→Scale All to do this automatically.
on 02025-09-29#video of Kyla Scanlon explaining the global supply chain of bicycle #manufacturing, comparing Litespeed (American Bicycle Group) in Tennessee (in the #USA) to a Sri Lankan factory for Ozone. #economics
on 02025-09-29#video tips on #manufacturing #optics with silicone molding. He likes using the plastic cups the mold was made in to hold his mold halves together, injecting his resin with a syringe through aquarium tubing into the bottom of his mold to drive bubbles out the vents in the top, Smooth-on Crystal Clear 200 resin (despite only having 20 minute pot life), degassing, casting in a pressure chamber, including a straw or even funnel extension for the sprues/vents to provide an excess of resin, drilling your vents and sprues with hardware-store brass tubes with sharpened edges, and hanging the lens up from a sprue for a week to let it fully cure (to avoid getting flat spots from the lens’s weight during that time).
on 02025-09-29#video by #Breaking-Taps on #manufacturing optically-clear epoxy copies of glass lenses by casting in silicone molds (Smooth-on Mold Max XLS); he gets 8.90nm RMS surface roughness on his copy, worse than the 1.74nm RMS surface roughness on the glass original, according to his AFM, plenty good for #optics. It worked easily for 10mm lenses, but it was difficult to get the process to work with 100mm lenses, with hazy surfaces (due to mold release), deviations from sphericality, etc. He says you can’t polish, lap, or grind plastic, which I don’t think is true of all plastics. A reader says, “Hey, I just want you to know that you can actually polish a plastic lens. I’m a lens maker in Canada and everything we do is plastic. We don’t always do PC but we do a ton of other materials. Everything gets polished.
we use a liquid polish and some abrasive pads, and I’m not exactly certain what kind of polish you could use for it, but it’s definitely something we do.”, and another comments, “I worked for years in a surface lab lapping and polishing plastic lenses all day. It’s absolutely practical”. A third says, “YES you can polish plastic as good as you can polish glass! You just need to use finer grit paper or less abbrasive [sic] materials and also you get the best result if you do wet sanding and then wet polish with VERY high grit sandpaper and oil or water. I do it myself so YES you can!” He sputtered metal (60nm silver) onto the glass as an alternative mold release that wouldn’t create micron-scale roughness. Smooth-on Accel-T tin-cure accelerator additive caused more shrinkage during curing of the silicone, ruining the figure of his mold. Relatedly, he says you want the resin to cure as slowly as possible, because fast-cure silicones shrink more. Mold Max XLS he says is 1000ppm shrinkage, EpoxaCast 690 is 2000ppm.
on 02025-09-28#video of #Evan-and-Katelyn #manufacturing #concrete keycaps for a custom keyboard with PVA glue replacing some of the water in the cement (like a quarter or half or something), using personal vibrators to get the mix down into the keycap molds where they’re overmolding keycap stems made with #3D-printing. Also they tried adding 3% chopped fiberglass to their concrete mix, which is totally going to fail. They also tried adding more sand. To suppress bubbles, they loaded the keycaps into a pressure pot to cure. The fiberglass concrete wasn’t sandable, breaking apart. The PVA concrete felt “super hard and dense”. They also made the outside of the case out of concrete. It weighs three pounds, and the wrist rest another 1.7.
on 02025-09-28#video by #Makers-Muse about #3D-printing floppy elastomer filament #materials that aren’t TPU, like PEBA, polyether block amide (?) which apparently you have to print at about 250° to get good layer adhesion. Also, foaming TPU, glass-filled polybutylene terephthalate (PBT-GF), and regular polypropylene, for which you need to coat your bed with polypropylene packing tape or something to get it to stick. Also a TPU/nylon mix and PVA as a water-soluble elastomer. #manufacturing
on 02025-09-28#video of #Evan-and-Katelyn #DIY #manufacturing a table with mannequin legs wearing high heels and also some worse ideas. #humor
on 02025-09-27#video #toread on #DIY #manufacturing rubrene, which is apparently a red- or yellow-fluorescent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (5,6,11,12-tetraphenylnaphthacene), which apparently took him two years. Also it’s used as an organic semiconductor in OLED displays. #materials
on 02025-09-27#video of #manufacturing silicone molds by thinning white silicone caulk with white spirit, painting it a couple millimeters thick onto a plaster (?) form over a wax mold release, backing it up with 5mm more of silicone caulk, backing that up with plaster, and using more plaster (with a little soapy water to prevent bubble adhesion) to make an object in the mold. Then, two-component polyurethane resin.
on 02025-09-27#video of #manufacturing a #Li-ion cell in a laboratory
on 02025-09-26#video on #Maslow-CNC making a #flat-cut sauna from plywood. He seems to be using four ropes to move the router horizontally on the garage floor now. #manufacturing #toread
on 02025-09-25#video of #3D-printing a book of #mechanisms: planetary gears, scotch yokes, a geneva wheel, a belt drive, various linkages, etc.; “Machines in Motion” by AxelMadeIt, with about 70 3-D-printed parts. Unfortunately he added some horrible AI slop doggerel. #manufacturing
on 02025-09-23#video of #manufacturing with a suitcase-portable die-cutting machine to upcycle from aluminum cans #toread
on 02025-09-18#video of #flexures for #3D-printing a sort of 50-gram plastic carabiner for a #manufacturing competition at “Maker Retreat”; it broke at 1.1 tonnes.
on 02025-09-13#video #toread on #manufacturing a servo-controlled word clock #mechanisms
on 02025-08-31#video of #manufacturing pots by turning stones (limestone?) on a belt-driven electric lathe, in, supposedly, Iran. Looks like they’re using single-point brazed-on tungsten-carbide tools (or would they have to be diamond?), but I wonder if you could do this with a star wheel. Quite an impressive spray of stone fragments and dust! The stone is epoxied to a flat ring (presumably steel) that gets chucked up in a 3-jaw lathe chuck. At the end the dude finishes it off by hand with a tool brazed onto some rebar rested on a 2×4! They saw the base off with a large abrasive saw, and some cuts with a huge angle grinder form a decorative octagonal rim.
on 02025-08-30on Giles Clement #manufacturing watch #mechanisms from scratch in a Brooklyn basement
on 02025-08-23how to make almost everything #manufacturing class, as taught by D. Sculley at MIT in 02019
on 02025-08-03Jacques Mattheij (#jacquesm) did a #CNC #manufacturing startup in the 80s which used stepper motors instead of servos, which turned it into “the startup from hell”. “These people knew their stuff and when they found out that our machine was using steppers, not servos they were immediately skeptical. Rightly so. Step-loss, the situation where you have told a stepper to make a move but it hasn’t had been observed before but not on the scale that we’re talking about here. (...) At Fred’s house things were not all that rosy either, his wife tried to torch their boat, and nearly succeeded. Round about this time my wife left me, and she was completely right about doing so. I’d been working day and night for almost as long as we’d been together by then thinking that I might get us out of the financial hole we were in if only I worked just a bit harder. (...) They ended up ditching the ST (good for them) dropped the steppers in favor of servos and rebuilt the whole thing on the PC, the software that I wrote was translated line-by-line to give them their first version which formed the basis of the stuff they still sell to this day.
Years later Fred showed up at my offices in IJmuiden to ask if I felt like doing it all again, from a copy of the software that he’d kept after selling the company.
I declined the offer, he also confessed that he’d torched that factory so I threw him out.”
on 02025-07-23tawr recommends this #manufacturing #video #toread with a yellow crayon Dykem alternative, from NIMI, “another skill-enhancing practical training video tailored for the ITI ecosystem and the vocational education community!”. He says, “the production quality is out of this world.”
on 02025-07-01#video #toread on #DIY fluidized-bed powder coating #manufacturing
on 02025-06-22#StrangeParts video about #manufacturing "eufy Make" is on #Nebula as well as YouTube
on 02025-06-22#news on TI #manufacturing #hardware in the US, planning they’re going to invest US$60 billion in obsolete (?) semiconductors manufacturing
on 02025-06-21The open-source hardware programmer for #Padauk chips, with links to order from PCBWay and Aisler. Hosted on "Kitspace": “Kitspace is a place to share ready-to-order #electronics designs. We automate parts purchasing so you can focus on building.” For sharing open-source hardware I guess. But I think they might just be scraping GitHub? #manufacturing #PCBA
on 02025-06-21PCBShopper lets you compare #pricing from 16 PCB houses on one page. #hardware #electronics #manufacturing
on 02025-06-21#video #toread about #circuit-sculpture and #manufacturing wires from raw metal by pulling them through a tungsten carbide drawplate, and twisting square wires, etc., using parts recycled from #hoarding, to make a landscape with trees.
on 02025-06-17#video on #manufacturing #electronics without PCBs, using point-to-point wiring with thick copper wires in free air. Peter Vogel’s “#Free-form electronics”. An annoying amount of talking-head filler. Mentions Vbugs and other #BEAM-robots and shows Eirik Brandal’s audio and kinetic sculpture work and MohitBhoite’s work. He’s using 800μm brass rod mostly and 1500μm brass tubing. He likes to build his circuits on a piece of graph paper glued to a board rather than up in the air, sometimes holding things in place with modeling clay, or rather Blu-Tack. At one point he adds a structural small-value capacitor between some unrelated brass-rod nets to increase rigidity. Unfortunately he made the time for the talking-head filler at the beginning of the video by omitting most of the circuit build from the end. #circuit-sculpture
on 02025-06-17#Chronova hand #manufacturing an electric motor whose shaft is 90μm across, like William McLellan’s answer to Feynman’s “Lots of Room” challenge. It’s a permanent-magnet rotor nestled in between four straight electromagnets wound with 20μm wire. He kept losing parts. He spent several months on it. His soft iron rotors had coercivity that was too low, and #machining alnico on his lathe turned out to be impossible until he used grinding wheels. He finally gave up and just floated the alnico disc in watch oil on the other side of a cover slip. He got an electromicrograph. #small #motors #hardware
on 02025-06-17#manufacturing #3D-printing #video by #Sanladerer on including formable ribs or ridges running the length of 3-D printed plastic holes as “self-forming threads” to allow M3 machine screws to reliably form threads in them, contrasting with other options like heat-set inserts, “prong nuts”, and inserted hex or square nuts.
on 02025-06-16#video of #bootstrapping a #CNC mill under AU$500 with a focus on rigidity and a small footprint with #3D-printing, using a non-gantry design to improve rigidity. A steel Allthread skeleton is wrapped in 3-D printed forms for the concrete, PLA with seams sealed with superglue. I don’t really understand how the threaded inserts in the concrete work; maybe the screw presses the 3-D printed plastic out against the concrete walls? He uses a vibrating sander as his vibrator for the concrete pour; after initial one-hour set, scraping with a spatula removes excess concrete. He says “non-gantry” but he’s using two sets of two parallel linear rails for the X and Y axes; it’s just that he’s moving the workpiece with anti-backlash-spring-loaded leadscrews rather than the toolhead. He’s also just using NEMA 17 steppers instead of real servos. #manufacturing
on 02025-06-16#video by #Destin on #manufacturing in the #USA, quoting Tim Cook on how the reason companies go to #China is for the skills. So he bought two used CNC machines and learned enough about injection molding to make working dies on them. His chainmail from India turned out to actually be from China. #toread
on 02025-06-08#video by #Not-an-Engineer about #bootstrapping #CNC #manufacturing. About half talking-head filler. #toread
on 02025-05-29#video on #manufacturing STM or AFM piezo actuators from piezo benders by cutting them into quarters with a box-cutter blade positioned by #3D-printing a jig
on 02025-04-01#manufacturing arc welders in Pakistan by winding transformers by hand.
on 02025-03-30#news #video saying #BYD is #manufacturing #EV cars in Thailand and Brazil, and soon in Indonesia and Hungary. #China #politics
on 02025-03-25more details on #BYD #EV #manufacturing delay in #Mexico, including background about Brazil and possible Mexican tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum. #politics #China
on 02025-03-25#BYD #EV #manufacturing delayed in #Mexico by #politics in #China, “fears of the technology leaking into the #USA” #news
on 02025-03-25#video about ultrasonic #machining #manufacturing to drill glass with 40kHz ultrasonic spindle units for grinding, developed in the early 80s by Yoshihiro Take, chairman of Takesho, in Kasuga, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, as reported by Michelle Yamamoto
on 02025-03-22#video on #3D-printing in metal with laser SLM in a #DIY rig #bootstrapping #manufacturing #toread
on 02025-03-22#machining #video by #AndysMachines on his die-sink #EDM #machining #manufacturing setup. He’s using an aquariump pump to circulate his distilled-water electrolyte through a coffee filter, which needs changing often. He switched to a photo-flash 160μF capacitor for his IGBT-triggered 60V sparks (averaging around 50V). The #electronics use two DRV8825 stepper drivers, though they have trouble with the noise; the die advances when the current averages below an adjustable limit of 2.5 amps, and then there are periodic retractions to permit better flushing. He measures the capacitor voltage with a voltage divider to estimate the current. #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video by #AndysMachines on #EDM #machining, using an RC circuit to limit the energy of each spark and an IGBT to switch it, with 20μs on and 180μs off time (5kHz 10%), 60V, a 100μF electrolytic cap (which gets too hot), a heating element to limit the cap’s inrush current, a 3mm brass electrode cutting aluminum, and just distilled water for the dielectric. He makes it through 1mm of aluminum in 23 seconds, 18mm³/minute. #electronics #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02025-03-12#video of die-sink #EDM #machining in diesel fuel using an Arduino, a MOSFET for PWM, a halogen worklight in series to limit current, and a stepper motor. #TheIdahoanShow reports that motor oil, WD-40, and canola oil also work, and aluminum and brass (such as a cartridge case) both work well as electrode materials, but TIG welder electrodes tended to stick and not cut very well. Stainless “kind of worked”. His demo was to cut a plus-sign-shaped hole into a chunk of old file. #bootstrapping #DIY #jugaad #manufacturing
on 02025-03-12#video #toread of #ThisOldTony #manufacturing a curved air knife
on 02025-03-04#bootstrapping a ribbon microphone by hand-corrugating signwriter’s leaf, which turns out to be aluminum 500 nanometers thick. #manufacturing
on 02025-01-22#Mitxela’s FLIP-fluid simulation on a 100MHz STM32 microcontroller in a gold-plated charlieplexing pendant. #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02025-01-16#Bitluni assembling a US$140 #CNC mill from a kit four years ago. After some trial and error and breaking a D-bit from having too low a speed and too high a speed, and an end mill from a mistake I didn’t understand, he does eventually succeed in #manufacturing a “PCB” from copper-clad. #video
on 02024-12-27#video on #manufacturing #mechanisms for recycling aluminum cans into flat metal sheets, using two rolling cutters similar to the cutter on a can opener.
on 02024-12-04#video #toread of #Uri-Tuchman #manufacturing rose engine ornamental lathe #mechanisms for #machining guilloché
on 02024-12-01#video by #We-can-do-that-better about #manufacturing a 26mm-diameter four-jaw lathe chuck. Demonstrates #machining soft jaws for a three-jaw chuck (each secured by two recessed screws) to perfectly grip the outer diameter of the small chuck, then reversing the soft jaws to cut a different radius on their other end. They use M3 triangular threads cut with taps and dies. It never occurred to me before, but some lathe chucks are like bloodworms in that they have four jaws. Brass locking pins Loctited into the back of the chuck hold the chuck screws in place by entering into undercuts in the middle of the chuck screw threads. Uses “poor man’s internal broaching” with a square broach ground from a broken tap to make square holes to drive the chuck screws with. 19 parts in all, almost all cut from a stainless bolt.
on 02024-12-01#Blondihacks #video #toread on #manufacturing a tool sharpener, part 2. #machining
on 02024-11-30#Blondihacks #video #toread on #manufacturing a tool sharpener, part 1. #machining
on 02024-11-30#Blondihacks #video #toread on #manufacturing a tool sharpener, part 5. #machining
on 02024-11-30#news #video nine months ago from #Deutsche-Welle on #solar #manufacturing in #Europe, for example by #Switzerland company #Meyer-Burger in #Germany, which is opening a new factory in #Colorado-Springs, #USA. Credits national #China policy prioritizing #polysilicon production in the early 02000s. Lots of talking-head filler by Richard Black, director of policy and strategy at #Ember. Says #Brazil is “leading the renewable #energy boom taking place across the continent”, but apparently is trying #import-substitution with tariffs, and #ABSOLAR isn’t convinced local producers are enough. Says #Trump plans to cut Biden’s US subsidies. “Today, solar-powered energy is the cheapest form of electricity for the majority of the countries that use it. (...) Estimates put the cost somewhere between 300 and 900 dollars per kilowatt by 2030.” I guess when they made this video the mainstream solar module price was €0.14/Wp, and now it’s 29% lower at €0.10/Wp (US$106/kWp). Panasonic and LG recently exited the market. #photovoltaic
on 02024-11-27#news from #Bloomberg on semiconductor #manufacturing in #Japan, where #TSMC begins mass production later this year following US$4.86 billion in subsidies to expand their Kumamoto plant announced in February. And Japanese startup #Rapidus plans to ship 2nm chips in 02027 with 590 billion yen (US$3.9B) in subsidies. And Japanese startup #Preferred-Networks supposedly has 7nm #neural-networks accelerator chip MN-Core 2, though presumably fabbed overseas by TSMC; their marketing is focused on energy efficiency and thus “sustainability”, and “is confident in bringing its AI chip design and supercomputer to market in a few years time”; they’re hoping Rapidus can fab their chips. 40%–50% of demand (as seen from Japanese semiconductor company Screen Holdings) comes from #China, especially the auto industry. An annoying amount of stock-footage filler. Much of the #video is about #JASM (a TSMC joint venture with Sony and Denso), which is “planning to begin mass production soon”, and its facility in Kikuyo.
on 02024-11-27so-called “antenna diodes” prevent damaging charge buildup in #manufacturing #microelectronics #toread
on 02024-11-22#PDF of the nickel plating handbook #electroplating #electrolysis #manufacturing
on 02024-11-20#video #toread on #manufacturing a kilogram of potassium #materials
on 02024-11-14Shan (shantaram.xyz, Siddharth Singh) got five of these theattentionbutton.in PCBs fabricated by Bangalore PCB fab Lioncircuits for ₹1000, 46.75×70mm, which is about US$12, with about 8 day turnaround (except they took 12 days last time because they forgot; later he described himself as “really fucking disappointed”). #electronics #manufacturing #pricing
on 02024-11-13#video #toread on many different #electronics #hardware #manufacturing prototyping techniques
on 02024-11-12#video on scratching off the surface of copper-clad FR4 PCB with a scriber in order to make a quick prototype board for surface-mount #electronics #hardware #manufacturing
on 02024-11-12#video about #Mr-Electron #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with a carbon brush from a motor as the cathode in a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, or some bent-up baling wire. He’s hacksawing the top off a lead-acid battery case from an old motorbike and gets an open-circuit voltage of about 1.6 volts and a short-circuit current that’s initially 20mA with an aluminum-foil anode; when he replaces the carbon-brush cathode with the bent-up baling wire this jumps to 40–80mA. #hoarding #electronics #energy #toread
on 02024-10-18#video about #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with #3D-printing ABS. He says potassium hydroxide will eat PLA, which makes sense but which I hadn’t realized. #Mr-Electron here is using steel baling wire for his cathodes. For his anode he cuts up thick aluminum sheet metal with shears and then presses it flat in a vise. Each aluminum anode plate is crimped onto baling wire from the following cell in the battery using a hammer and anvil. He gets 10.2V open-circuit voltage from 8 series cells. I’m unclear how air is supposed to get to his cathodes. He does some load testing with small electric motors but doesn’t actually measure the current. The short-circuit current he measures is 160mA and rapidly dropping. After testing with LEDs for a while the open-circuit voltage has dropped to 3.8 volts. Later he cuts cathode forms out of CDs with an angle grinder and cutoff disc, wrapping them tightly with baling wire to maximize area. His higher-current anodes are aluminum-foil-wrapped popsicle sticks, dimensioned to fit inside the battery compartments, but for whatever reason he didn’t install the plates parallel, resulting in a dramatically unnecessarily high internal battery resistance, which he doesn’t bother to measure, but he gets 240mA out of it. His connections to the aluminum plates are made by torquing a pringled steel washer down onto their non-submerged ends with a bolt. The 6 cells in series ought to give about 9.6 volts open-circuit, but instead he gets only 4.8V (0.8V per cell), which he blames on residual sulfuric acid contamination, but commenter “gsestream” suggests might be due to a lack of oxygen. He uses a DFRobot USB boost converter to charge his cellphone. #bootstrapping #scouting #jugaad
on 02024-10-18#video taking apart some #Tesla motors and discussing how their #manufacturing is done. The motors have a lot of electromagnetic poles, like hundreds of poles, on the three-phase stator, although they do gear the motor down to the wheel. There are cooling channels through the stator. The rotors seem to be permanent-magnet type with laminates (electrical steel?) and carbon fiber wound around them presumably to keep them from coming apart. The laminates give you almost no flux outside the rotor except at 12 spots around the circumference where there’s a gap comparable to the size of the poles on the stator. The magnets are actually quite small compared to the whole rotor.
on 02024-09-22#video on recreating #Gelbart’s bending brake #manufacturing
on 02024-09-21#video of #Gelbart mostly about spot welding. He recommends 15–25 kVA spot welders at 2½ volts with 5000 amps, for 1–4 cycles for thin ferrous sheet metal, up to 10 gauge, and up to 12 cycles for mounting hardware like screws or, with a conical-hole electrode, balls for kinematic mounts. I’m guessing a “cycle” is 16⅔ms. Talks about how to spot-weld #nitinol into #flexures. Recommends tungsten/copper or chrome/copper alloy tips for your electrodes. #manufacturing #precision
on 02024-09-21#video of #Gelbart mostly about how to use adhesives, especially silicone, epoxy, polyurethane (e.g., Gorilla Glue), and spray contact cement. Also talks about #flexures for clamping things. And how peeling-mode failure kills adhesive joints, though less so if you use flexible adhesives. #manufacturing
on 02024-09-21#video on #manufacturing a Le Corbusier style chaise longue from 19mm-thick #Portland #concrete reinforced with alkali-resistant chopped glass fibers and an alkali-resistant glass fiber scrim and an acrylic filler, laid over a #CNC routed MDF form.
on 02024-09-18#JSK-koubou #video #toread on #manufacturing circular-saw hacks #todelete
on 02024-09-16#video on sharpening zirconia knives, which turned out to be difficult; he had to make the “increase the sharpening angle relative to the stone, making the apex angle more obtuse” to get the apex to stop chipping off on his resin-bonded diamond stones. Lots of slow-motion closeup footage. He was unable to get the zirconia knife to a hair-whittling edge. #manufacturing
on 02024-09-16#video #toread on #manufacturing a "murrine" vase at First City Art Center. I thought this was going to be about calcium fluoride #materials, but actually it’s just sections diamond-sawn from glass canes. The end result unfortunately looks kind of badly drawn. #glassblowing
on 02024-09-16#video on #Cylo problems in #precision #optics #manufacturing #mechanisms: “Nanoscale air bearing vibrations cause surface finish issues in diamond turned surfaces.” 50 nanometers of vibration gave a “hazy” surface finish, although you’d think it wouldn’t.
on 02024-09-15#Chronova #video #toread on #manufacturing tiny steam-engine #mechanisms.
on 02024-09-15#video on the #history of #electronics #manufacturing in mainland #China
on 02024-09-11#video on #manufacturing #kinematic-coupling for air bearings for #precision #mechanisms. #Cylo ground a three-planed vee out of W-1 tool steel to place a bearing ball in, with slots in the sides for access, then hardened and polished it. I wonder why he didn’t just use three bearing balls? He states (incorrectly, I think) that the small contact surface area between the ball and the planes produces lower static friction.
on 02024-09-10#video on #manufacturing #kinematic-coupling #precision #mechanisms with #3D-printing by #Sonya-Vasquez. Using pairs of round metal dowels and threaded balls.
on 02024-09-10#video on #machining the end of the hardtail vise #manufacturing #toread #Abom79
on 02024-09-10#video on #CNC helical interpolation to mill holes in angle iron #manufacturing #toread #Abom79
on 02024-09-10#video on #CNC #machining a bolt circle with "conversational programming" #manufacturing #toread #Abom79
on 02024-09-10#video on turning and facing aluminum beauty rings #machining #manufacturing #toread #Abom79
on 02024-09-10#video on DIY #manufacturing for prototypes on a shoestring, nominally for fishing, with shitty elevator music. Many excellent techniques, very clearly filmed. Filing the jaw serrations off a clothespin. Supergluing an inner-tube section to it. Cutting it off flush with a snap-off box cutter. Softening the clothespin with a pencil butane torch. Bending it to shape with needlenose pliers. Cutting a section of broken umbrella rib with diagonal cutters. Shaping its end with a Dremel. Melting it into the clothespin with the butane torch. Forming a mold around it with masking tape and filling it with hot glue to hold it in place reliably. Adding a heatshrink handle to the metal with the torch. Using the clothespin to tie a hangman’s-noose-like knot onto a fishhook, then a similar one around the shaft of another fishhook. Cutting up a soft plastic syringe with a box cutter. Melting a round hole through its plunger with a screwdriver heated with the torch. Heating a steel spring to melt it into the end of the syringe body. Slipping the plunger through the spring and into the syringe body to form a spring-loaded plunger. Using the combination for fishhook manipulation again, and to tie knots in fishing line. Removing the remaining flux from a dilapidated stick-welding rod by crushing it with needle-nose pliers. Spinning it in a drill chuck in sandpaper to polish it. Bending it into a circle with improbably small round-nose pliers (apparently welding rod is annealed‽). Shaping the ends of the welding rod with a file and Dremel. Drilling corks with an electric wood drill. Shoving the now-pointed welding rod through the corks. Supergluing the corks in place along the welding rod. Hardening superglue with baking soda. Spinning the corks with the drill in sandpaper to even them out. Bending the rod into a pointed hook with a float. Cutting a soft plastic enteral-feeding syringe body with a hacksaw blade. Cutting it on Sharpie marks with diagonal cutters. Deburring the edges with a box cutter. Cutting the plastic with scissors. Flame-polishing the cut edge with the torch. Softening the plastic with the torch and hand-bending it while soft. Melting holes in it with a soldering iron. Improving the holes (?) with an electric drill. Melting the ends of a thin plastic tube with a cigarette lighter to get them to swell up a bit so they can’t go through the holes. Forming a plastic grommet for a wire loop in this way from a short section of plastic tube, cut with scissors. Various fishing-line knotting techniques. Puncturing a Kinder Egg at each end with a steel awl. Drilling out the holes to size with an electric wood drill. Cutting ends off a Q-tip with scissors to get a plastic tube to thread through the Kinder Egg holes. Supergluing it in place. Bending wire into a sort of cotter pin to install in the plastic tubing. Cutting a cigarette-lighter flint spring with diagonal cutters. Threading the spring and beads onto the cotter pin. Heating its pliers-bent end so a bead melts onto it.
on 02024-09-10#precision kinematic couplings and related work. “Just using the most ordinary quality kinematic hardware will produce repeatability between the two kinematic platforms in the micrometer (40 micro inch) range. By using super stiff cermet component parts with the geometry and surface texture held to the highest possible quality, repeatability in the nanometer range can be achieved.” The micron range is ordinary bearing-ball tolerances, so I suspect that as long as you’re not swapping out your bearing balls, you can get much better repeatability than a micron. Lots of ideas about #exact-constraint design that I wasn’t familiar with! Not very well written, though; lots of repetition. Practical tips: “A complete ball can be economically installed in a kinematic platform by first machining a pocket that is nearly hemispherical. A female cone can be used, but it is much less effective. This pocket is wetted with a high strength epoxy glue, and the ball is clamped in place with enough force to squeeze out the excess glue. Wipe the excess epoxy glue away with some absorbent material wetted with Isopropyl Alcohol.” Unfortunately this advice is repeated almost verbatim in almost every single entry! Also not very reliable; it claims EDM uses an electrolyte, for example. #manufacturing #mechanisms
on 02024-09-09#USA #China #politics: “The most important chokepoints in the context of this discussion are AI chip designs, electronic design automation software, semiconductor #manufacturing equipment, and equipment components. The Biden administration’s latest actions simultaneously exploit U.S. dominance across all four of these chokepoints. In doing so, these actions demonstrate an unprecedented degree of U.S. government intervention to not only preserve chokepoint control but also begin a new U.S. policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry—strangling with an intent to kill. (...) By invoking the foreign direct product rule, the United States is prohibiting any semiconductor manufacturing company worldwide from providing services to any Chinese chip design company that is seeking to make high-end chips for AI or supercomputing. (...) To state it bluntly, these recent actions are designed to put the roughly 28 Chinese chip design and supercomputing firms on the parties of concern lists out of business. (...) the Biden administration is going beyond the traditional U.S. policy of seeking to keep the United States’ two semiconductor technology nodes ahead of China and is now trying to actively degrade China’s technological maturity below its current level. (...) It is as though the United States is saying to China “AI technology is the future. We and our allies are going there. You can’t come.””
on 02024-09-07#video #toread about #3D-printing woodworking tools #bootstrapping #manufacturing
on 02024-09-05#video #toread about #3D-printing tools #bootstrapping #manufacturing #teaching-tech
on 02024-09-05#video #toread about pioneers (?) of nano #manufacturing
on 02024-09-05#video #toread about “a deep dive” into Canon’s #nanoimprint lithography #manufacturing
on 02024-09-05#video on #manufacturing SO₃ #materials #bootstrapping by #NurdRage. I didn’t know you could dehydrate H₂SO₄ with H₄P₂O₇! But he’s dehydrating it with Na₂S₂O₇ instead.
on 02024-09-04#Shake-the-Future #video on his “print-wave casting” #manufacturing technique with #3D-printing
on 02024-09-03#Blondihacks #video on #manufacturing a tool sharpener (part 3). Also mostly lathework on laser-cut steel and drilling in a mill with a DRO. She’s mostly working on a table in this part, with a couple of four-bar linkages permitting two degrees of freedom of translation with no rotation. Demonstrates round-head screws for using threaded holes as references, an improvised hose-clamp-driven collet, etc. #machining
on 02024-09-03#Blondihacks #video on #manufacturing a tool sharpener (part 4) #machining. Mostly lathework on laser-cut mild steel, with some milling, and discussion of a machining error, how to avoid it, and how to compensate it.
on 02024-09-03#video #toread on #manufacturing a #wire bender
on 02024-09-03#video on bending #wire with a wire bending jig for #manufacturing fishing lures #toread
on 02024-09-03#video on #manufacturing a 2-stroke engine from mostly raw materials but also a piston and connecting rod
on 02024-09-03#video #toread on #manufacturing a water-cooled bed
on 02024-09-03another #video on #manufacturing #ethylene #materials automatically by #Hyperspace-Pirate. He wants to use it as a second-stage refrigerant for his vapor-compression cryocooler for #cryogenics. He wants to separate ethanol into ethylene and water over a propane-heated sapphire catalyst (Wisesorb activated alumina from wisesorbent.com in 3.5mm balls) at 450°, which is fucking awesome. Around 300° to 350° you would instead get ether, and above 550° you mostly get carbon and hydrogen, the production of which starts at around 500°. Between 400° and 500° you mostly get ethylene (and water). Aluminum pipe contains the catalyst (and a thermocouple for temperature control), and copper line and flare nuts move the ethanol and ethylene vapor around. The pieces are supported on cinder blocks and bricks on what looks like a concrete floor. Bubbling the output through water produces a lot of flammable gas, which is probably ethylene. He adds a plastic juice bottle full of water as a bubbler to remove particles and a second plastic juice bottle full of silica-gel desiccant to separate the ethylene from the water, and then a dust filter to remove particles of the silica gel. He bolts together some aluminum L-profiles to hold things in place and 3-D prints a fixture for the bottles. A “25-foot” condenser coil of copper line with a fan blowing on it serves as a heat exchanger to cool the hot ethylene to near ambient. A second bubbler collects the liquids, which include a significant amount of ether. He collects the ethylene output in a beach ball. He uses a fridge compressor to pump it from the beach ball into a pressure tank previously purged with propane. His 500cc of 151-proof Everclear turned into 69.7g of ethylene, only a 39% yield, probably because he made about 50 grams of ether. On a second run he used a higher catalyst temperature and got a 70% yield. Chemical engineer in the comments: “It absolutely blew my mind to see someone casually building a packed-bed plug-flow reactor from plumbing parts and unspecified alumina beads in his garage, and the damn thing actually working! Seriously, well done! (Deep down I’m almost insulted by the fact you managed to get a decent yield without doing any equations to work out the reaction rate, and therefore flow rate and reactor length required 😂)” but he also suggests that the output ethylene product is probably contaminated with a lot of ether.
on 02024-09-03#video #toread on #manufacturing #ethylene #materials automatically by #Hyperspace-Pirate
on 02024-09-03#video #toread on #manufacturing a #cold-plasma torch
on 02024-09-03#video on #optics at #ASML by Huygens Optics, discussing how getting more than one order of diffraction from your shadow mask into your imaging optics can improve the resolution of the resulting image. #precision #manufacturing
on 02024-09-02another #Malawey #manufacturing #video. JB-welding coaxial things inside a brass sleeve, which failed between 60 and 80 “inch-pounds” (7–9 N m) maybe because he didn’t let it set long enough. He says you can bond silicone to already-cured silicone (like a silicone sheet bought from the store) with full strength, so you can use it to jugaad things together, like an insulating pad he put on his magnetic-stirring hotplate, and an extra finger grip for his soldering iron, and his custom soldering rack with a silicone tube inside a steel tube. You can mix white silicone with any oil paint. Demonstrates how he can reuse a polyethylene cup after mixing white silicone with blue pigment in it. Demonstrates melting hot glue (EVA?) with a heat gun to make a light diffuser over a LED. Describes which plastics are annoyingly glue-resistant. Talks about Liquid Nails and similar construction adhesives, which he says are basically pasty wood glue (I think that’s chemically false) because it’s sandable and paintable, stronger than wood, water-resistant, shrinks when it dries, and washes off with water when wet (water cleanup). Then points out that non-water-soluble construction adhesives are totally different. He says the pasty stuff is better at filling gaps and so sometimes stronger in practice, though weaker in theory. Explains that J-B Weld does make something of a chemical bond with metal, not a purely mechanical one. Peels cured J-B Weld off a bicycle inner tube segment. Shows nylon resisting J-B Weld adhesion. Demonstrates how J-B Weld can be popped off ABS and soft polyurethane with some force. Taps 30-hour cured J-B Weld with a combined drill and M4 tap. He 3-D printed a PVC cement can lid grabbing tool! Then he gets off talking about Bondo and epoxy resin composites and whatnot. Demonstrates soaking nylon webbing in epoxy to somewhat stick it to other nylon webbing. Recommends E6000 or a similar contact cement like Weldwood for sticking to things like smooth, shiny polyethylene, but it still won’t withstand any substantial amount of tension or peeling. He did manage to glue nylon webbing by impregnating it heavily with black ABS cement! The adhesive he tried on EVA foam (Titebond PVC trim adhesive and sealant) didn’t stick, and between two sheets of nylon it didn’t even set.
on 02024-09-01#video #toread about #manufacturing TeO₂ glass #materials with bright fluorescence
on 02024-08-31#video #toread of #manufacturing an 1890s-style Japanese blowtorch from brass
on 02024-08-28#video on #manufacturing #optics by #machining pure copper (to eliminate inclusions enriched in other elements that can cause tearout) with a monocrystalline diamond cutter. Lots of footage from atomic force #microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. To eliminate 50μm steps between adjacent passes of the diamond milling cutter, he switched to 0rpm, just using his milling machine as a sort of shaper, and got the surface roughness down to about 13nm. #Breaking-Taps
on 02024-08-28#video on LCD SLA #3D-printing at costs competitive with injection molding (an ad for #Merit3D). New UV Basics Hard Black resin from Photocentric has pricing of “only” €20/kg; he says prices are 4–5× the costs of thermoplastics because thermoplastics are “already a commoditized item”. Shitty video consisting of 80% talking heads, stock footage, and even stock photos. He holds up an example molded part and says an injection mold would be US$10k to US$20k, and then each part would cost 75¢, while with his company’s machines, it’s US$2–3 per part. For smaller and more complex parts, he says the breakeven point where injection molding is cheaper is closer to 5 million parts. They’re a service bureau rather than a printer vendor. #manufacturing
on 02024-08-27#video #toread of “turning my home workshop into a robot factory, DIY industrial robot arm, part 1” #manufacturing #automation
on 02024-08-27#video #toread of #bootstrapping #manufacturing potassium permanganate from 40g MnO₂, 55g KOH, 30g KNO₃, 5.5% NaOCl, and 31% HCl #materials #scouting
on 02024-08-27#video of #Helmke #3D-printing some #mechanisms out of plastic to sort and assemble parts pneumatically with a magazine-fed pneumatic parts feeder for his screws. Sucking them through with a sort of aspirator helped solve some bouncing problems he was having that gave him backwards screws. Finally he wires them together with a CAN bus. #automation #manufacturing
on 02024-08-27#Malawey #video on #precision #mechanisms with #3D-printing: “Borrow a Tolerance!” Lots of wisdom about mechanical engineering and which industrial #manufacturing processes have which drawbacks. He shows a 3-D printed collet as one example of a non-borrowed good tolerance. Demonstrates some 3-D printed springs in I guess ABS, but says you can “borrow a [precision] spring rate” from a spring-steel binder clip, which also doesn’t creep at “any temperature a human can survive”. Borrowing smoothness and toughness from HDPE tubing (from water systems) to make hinges; he sharpens it in a pencil sharpener to get it to go through his #print-in-place hinges more easily. His print-in-place approach has support material between parallel horizontal layers which must be broken free with a spatula or hammer.
on 02024-08-27#manufacturing molds for wire repair with a hot-glue gun using #3D-printing to overmold hot glue over broken cables to make a waterproof flexible repair. He uses vegetable oil as a mold release and PETG for the FDM printing. Very nice neat results.
on 02024-08-21Brian Potter’s account of #manufacturing #history in #USA, and in particular the Heavy Press Program
on 02024-08-21#video of #manufacturing #woodworking tools by #3D-printing: templates for a router, an air guide for a router vacuum cleaner, a T-square with holes at 1-mm increments for drawing parallel to an edge (printing the first layer in a contrasting color), screw pattern guides for particular hinges, a drill guide for putting your Forstner bit the right distance from the edge of a plywood panel, a clamp with a rather oversized screw thread, and a scribing tool for transferring the outline of a wall onto the edge of a board you want to cut. #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-08-20#video #toread from #JSK-koubou about 25 #woodworking #manufacturing hacks
on 02024-08-13#video on #manufacturing #titanium features on glass with #photolithography with 20μm resolution with vacuum coating by magnetron argon sputtering. He tried using a photographic enlarger in reverse without success. His setup is about 2 meters tall and made from 8020 aluminum extrusions, with a Minolta camera zoom lens (35–70mm, DSLR?) focusing onto the photoresist on his microscope slide, after a Fresnel-lens illumination stage similar to an overhead projector (and possibly actually taken from one), converging the light onto the camera lens. He’s using a 395nm LED behind two diffusers from LCD monitors for the light source, which make the light more homogeneous on the focal plane than just focusing from the LED. He’s using a transparency film intended for screen printing to get more opaque masks, laser-printable maybe, sandwiched between two sheets of glass to keep it flat. Previously he was using this blue dry film photoresist, but couldn’t get consistent results. He tried spin-coating Mungolux R1000 liquid photoresist. Finally he used a Merck MicroChemicals AZ LNR-003 positive photoresist designed for lift-off techniques, spending US$170 on a 100mℓ bottle. He 3-D printed his spin coater, built around a drone motor. Because the slide is transparent he can put a USB microscope behind it to focus the camera lens. The undeveloped photoresist is washed off with lye and the developed photoresist lifts off the titanium with acetone. His sponsor PCBWay manufactured the magnetron he designed for sputtering. His Minolta setup gives him 14× reduction, which is how he gets to 20μm.
on 02024-08-01#video on "quadrupolar" #3D-printing with four nozzles on radial arms over a polar bed, almost a meter in diameter. Still seems like it has a dead zone in the middle. He used mostly stepper motors and aluminum 8020 extrusions. He’s limited to making things that are fourfold symmetric by the Clipper firmware he’s using. #manufacturing
on 02024-08-01Mike Bell’s #video on #manufacturing the #Guinness winning #Peregreen-2 #flying #drones explains why they wanted inherent stability: so they wouldn’t have to waste differential thrust on stabilization. He explains the batteries were 48V, 12S, 1500mAh × 2, 160C (!!!). To smooth the transparent canopy they printed it from PVA (!!) and misted it with isopropanol for days. Apparently he designed the shape in Blender!
on 02024-07-31#video by #Nicholas-Rehm of dRehmFlight on #manufacturing a #flying ceiling fan nearly five meters in diameter out of insulation foam, Gorilla Glue, pine boards, and plywood, for the aerial combat part of Flite Fest in Ohio. Video sponsor PCBWay made the motor mounts by #sheet-cutting and bending 4mm aluminum plate. He’s using two 16000mAh 22.2-volt 15C battery packs to power its 15kW in 12 730KV Emax motors. He fried two Teensy microcontrollers because the power line to one of the four arms was hooked up backwards. Unsurprisingly it ran out of battery quickly; the battery packs were only rated for 10.7kW, and for under 4 minutes. He probably should have put some skin on his foam, because one of the blades broke lengthwise along a pine board after an impact, which would have been easy to prevent.
on 02024-07-31#video on Luke Bell and Mike Bell #manufacturing #Guinness winning fast #flying #drones called "Peregreen 2", in part by CNC-cutting frame parts out of a carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic sheet (#sheet-cutting). Because streamlining was a top concern, it’s sort of rocket-shaped, which they played with by printing a transparent tail and illuminating it from within. Their fake batteries caught on fire, their motor wires caught on fire, their motor wires desoldered themselves from the ESC, their ESCs caught on fire, their PID control loops went out of control and crashed the drone, their motors turned out to be anemic, rough skin produced excessive drag, etc. But finally they got it to go 133m/s average over 100 meters, 142m/s peak. They were using FPV flying with goggles.
on 02024-07-31#video on #manufacturing borosilicate glass #materials in a microwave. His glass ate his insulating firebrick, but he was able to get it to work by using a ceramic crucible as a firebrick liner.
on 02024-07-10#Shake-the-Future #video of #3D-printing a split casting box, with alignment pins, with the pre-split casting form halves already in it, allows you to pour investment casting plaster (dental casting plaster without sand) onto the print bed, then withdraw the form from the plaster once it sets up. Sprues can be hollow, and I guess the form can too. He’s using PLA, which in this case you don’t actually want to spontaneously delaminate from the bed when it cools. And he’s running G-code on the printer (a Prusa MK4) to shake out the bubbles from the plaster! This also avoids the need for alignment pins in the form (just the box) and the need for parting dust. I bet you could do this with sand casting too! To help with withdrawing the form from the mold, he microwaves it in a plastic bag, which even permits undercuts, like lost-PLA casting. No plastic is left in the mold when you turn the furnace on. He uses his airfryer to dry the mold for two hours, then his oven for three more hours at 250°. And then he uses a microwave kiln to melt brass! He says it can even melt stainless! His alignment-pin holes were sized for M8 bolts, which also hold the mold shut. He uses a Noga deburring tool to remove the mold flash. He calls this technique “print-wave casting” because he uses the microwave. #manufacturing
on 02024-07-10#CodysLab #video #manufacturing a cast-iron skillet with thermite #materials
on 02024-07-07#TPAI #video #toread about #manufacturing his #CNC plasma cutter
on 02024-07-06#TPAI #video #manufacturing a #CNC milling machine from mostly scrap metal. He’s using the crankshaft timing pulley from a VW Golf 2 1.8 8V engine to couple his head-sized NEMA 34 junkyard stepper motors to his junkyard Acme leadscrews for the Y-axis, because the pulleys cost US$5. The pulleys have a size-L toothed belt with a 14.5mm bore and four M8 threads around the outside, one offset by 5°. He drills the pulleys out larger to fit onto the leadscrew shafts, then makes an aluminum driving adapter to bolt the pulleys to so he can couple them to the shaft. For coupling the other pulleys to the 14mm stepper shafts, he also drilled them out bigger, then made a brass tube adaptor to which the pulleys are held with three setscrews. For his X axis he’s using a junkyard ballscrew. He mentions that ATX power supply #electronics have their -12V rail connected to their enclosures and to the ground wire, which I didn’t think was correct, but anyway he removed that connection in order to be able to use four of them in series to get 48V. For sheet metal bending without a brake, he clamped his sheet metal to the edge of a table and whaled on it with a 4×4 board. He demonstrates the use of his existing homemade CNC plasma cutter. Finally he mounts a 2000-watt wood router onto the large gantry he’s built and uses it to route some beech butcher block and some aluminum plate, and even 4mm-deep grooves in steel (using a tungsten carbide bit). He mentions the need to minimize the number of piercing operations for CNC plasma cutting because of how they wear out the nozzle quickly, a consideration I hadn’t realized.
on 02024-07-06#manufacturing a sort of surface gauge for woodworking for marking horizontal lines on things. #video
on 02024-06-26#video about #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with either KOH or NaCl electrolytes. #energy #electrolysis Unfortunately “members only”.
on 02024-06-25#video about #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with dual electrolytes: potassium hydroxide and 50% H₂SO₄, separated by a membrane, to get a higher voltage, over 2 volts. Uses “activated carbon felt” (??) for the air electrode. With a single electrolyte he gets 1.56V. He suggests bleach as an alternative alkaline electrolyte and vinegar as an alternative acid. He uses paper towels to hold the electrolytes in place. For “some short testing” he uses baking paper as the membrane, but of course it won’t last long in that environment! He suggests Nafion as the only viable membrane option. His postage-stamp-sized test cell gets 2.2 volts and can light an LED. He adds MnO₂ to his graphite electrode as, I think, a depolarizer, boosting the cell to 2.5V. (Maybe it’s an actual electrolyte material, though?). For whatever reason he never measures its short-circuit current, except for showing that the LED lights and doesn’t immediately burn out, so the battery presumably has on the order of 100Ω of equivalent resistance. Finally he builds a version of the battery with a salt bridge instead of a membrane, but using zinc rather than aluminum. Surprisingly the salt-bridge version is also able to light the LED, despite presumably having much higher ESR. #energy #electrolysis
on 02024-06-25#video about #3D-printing a whole #flying drone, “even the motors”, using 3 kg of filament, but evidently they’re wound with regular copper wire and using steel cartridge ball bearings and steel nuts and bolts and, originally, a steel 8mm shaft and collar, which he replaced with (brass?) heat-stake inserts and a precision-ground steel shoulder bolt. The motor’s magnetic core is, however, 3D-printed using “magnetic PLA”. He’s also using (rare-earth?) permanent magnets. The dovetailed arms (evidently designed using #topology-optimization, and vastly overspecced) are held on with a very interesting plastic twistlock design. He measures the thrust as ≈3kg of weight (≈30N) using a US$8 load cell from Amazon, but the motor took 2½ seconds to spin up to full thrust rather than the 800ms for a much smaller comparable-thrust off-the shelf all-metal type. By #Michael-Rechtin. #mechanical #manufacturing
on 02024-06-25#video #toread on the cheapest MIG welder in the world. #mechanical #manufacturing
on 02024-06-25#video #toread on #3D-printing “viral” tools “so you don’t have to” #manufacturing
on 02024-06-25#video on #3D-printing for #manufacturing #electronics #hardware with the Micronics SLS nylon printer #toread #Krasnow
on 02024-06-25#ebook #toread Procedures In Experimental Physics, by John Strong. “Many procedures for the #physics lab, including: glass-blowing, high #vacuum, electrometers, Geiger counters, optics, heat and high temperature, and [#manufacturing] techniques. Profusely illustrated by Roger Hayward.” #CC #public-domain because 01938 copyright not renewed
on 02024-06-24#video #toread on the best DIY method for #manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs) using UV-curing ink and solder mask. 3 hours. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-06-24short #video of #manufacturing keys for #keyboards out of Fimo or something similar
on 02024-06-15#video #toread on #manufacturing a thermoacoustic Stirling engine #hardware
on 02024-06-15#Tech-Ingredients #video about #manufacturing diffraction grating #optics in chocolate
on 02024-06-12#ElAngelito #video on #electrolysis sharpening of steel wires in a stainless steel sugar bowl with a saturated table salt solution. He’s using an inverter arc welder as his power supply set at the lowest amperage. He got thick fencing wire to sharpen to a point in three or four minutes of holding it in the salt water. #materials #manufacturing #bootstrapping
on 02024-06-10#video about #manufacturing a simple electric arc furnace for melting brass
on 02024-06-02#video about #manufacturing silicon #materials from sand with thermite. I didn't finish it because after the first five minutes he was still just talking to the camera. Luis Horas is not always this bad.
on 02024-06-02#video #clickbait #manufacturing “illegal stove” that “uses water” (to increase turbulence and therefore combustion rate and therefore temperature in a waste-oil burner welded up out of steel pipes). Nothing illegal about it, it’s just a water-blown blowtorch (that probably produces a lot of CO).
on 02024-05-31#video on #manufacturing a steel-cutting machine from windshield wiper motors. Kind of #clickbait, the motor just moves a plasma torch along rails. I mean, he does show the process of fabricating the machine out of mostly cold-rolled plate with an angle grinder, drill press, and MIG welder, but then he uses fancy precision-ground hardened steel rails and sliding ball bearings. And the actual cutting part is the torch, which he doesn’t make.
on 02024-05-31#bootstrapping #machining and #manufacturing with a milling machine made of granite for #precision, the "RIG-CNC"
on 02024-05-21Curt Filipowski #manufacturing a #machining lathe from concrete and a CNC router with gas-pipe ways
on 02024-05-20#Blondihacks explains the #bootstrapping of #manufacturing #precision in #machining: #history (Vaucanson, Maudslay, Andrey Nartov), and promises a series of articles covering the topic comprehensively. But that was six years ago.
on 02024-05-20#video touting “BAXEDM”’s DIY wire #EDM kit for #manufacturing parts with high #precision; getting his “location” fit (ISO H7/h6) for his M-shaped “shaft” requires +0/-16μm tolerance on the “shaft” and +25/-0μm on the hole, so you need about ±8μm precision. He’s using a 300μm nominal kerf width, shooting for ±10μm precision, using 15mm-thick cold-rolled 304 stainless plate. He got the “shaft” almost 10μm under the nominal dimension.
on 02024-05-17#video of #Rack-Robotics’s DIY wire #EDM #machining rig, including #manufacturing it with #3D-printing from carbon-fiber-filled PLA; the power supply here is their “Powercore V2”, which is 200 watts at 70 Vdc output with “up to” 90% efficiency for US$400. He uses a jug of distilled water from the store. He says the Powercore is “expecting a 1Ω resistance”, so it doesn’t shock him when he puts his hand in the circuit, though I notice he doesn’t connect it across his two hands. He says the wire’s outer coating is zinc, not tin as I had guessed. He says the water circulation is 100 “psi”, and it seems to be moving at a pretty good clip parallel to the wire. He touts ±100μm tolerances on the current revision, which sounds pretty shitty for wire EDM, and for the next revision they’re still only targeting 50μm, so they’re really trying for the rapid prototyping market here, not the traditional ultra-precision market of wire EDM. The motors (“hybrid” steppers) are kept out of the water, using only mechanical linkages to move the toolhead and tension the wire underneath the water. They dunk it in a 10-“gallon” aquarium to hold the water. They’ve moved to Colorado Springs and gotten funded. (This video is from this week.) 180 watts output at 5kHz implies 36 millijoules per spark, which implies about a 14μF output capacitor.
on 02024-05-17#video of #manufacturing a DIY wire #EDM for #machining; basically an ad for #Rack-Robotics’s (rackrobo.io) maybe-someday-open-source Wire Tool replacement hotend to turn any 24-volt 3-D printer into an EDM machine with 300μm brass wire, which looks silver, so maybe it’s tinned. Not sure how the filtration and feedback works, which seems like almost the most important part? He never mentions filtering. Also demonstrates hand-carving a 600μm aluminum plate with a 1.5mm brass rod electrode, which ought to be impossible because it should short out to the workpiece when you’re holding it in your hand, but actually it works fine. Gets up to 100mm/minute with the wire on the 600μm aluminum, or 20mm/minute in 3mm aluminum, while steel is 4½ times slower, while titanium is only 2–2½ times slower than aluminum. The power supply (“Powercore V1”) goes up to 72 volts, but the demo is all at 65 volts; he says the hard part is actually the power supply, which is “high voltage” (ha!), high power, 5000 Hz. This is at #rmrrf which I think is the Rocky Mountain RepRap Fest.
on 02024-05-17#manufacturing snap-fits with #3D-printing #video by adding chamfers to widen the snaps at their bases, overextruding, using PETG or nylon, or printing on a 45° angle and rounding your bottom edges to prevent elephant-footing and diminish the overhang from printing on an angle, or printing on its side. Minnesota accent.
on 02024-05-16#manufacturing folding furniture #video by woodworker #John-Malecki. This is the viral folding door and hyperboloid desk thing. Shows his frustration with a lot of the difficulties he ran into.
on 02024-05-14#manufacturing a toy sword from transparent plastic to make it “invisible”, using a disc sander progression and headlight polish. Sadly, he breaks his unbreakable sword at 14'36", but then uses it to break boards and bricks. #video
on 02024-05-13#manufacturing a slingshot #mechanical design to reach 84 joules #video
on 02024-05-13#manufacturing a plywood toy gun that makes noise #video #toread
on 02024-05-11#video of #gomezgimenez #manufacturing a solder-paste stencil for #electronics #hardware from an aluminum can. The cotton gloves for handling the aluminum are a good idea. He anneals it with a clothes iron on the high setting on a corkboard for 20 minutes, then removes the paint with acetone. First he tries photolithography with photoresist film. For a photomask he prints out three identical transparencies on a Brother laser printer and cyanoacrylate-glues them together. His UV source for exposing the photosensitive film is one of those nail-salon UV caves. 2% washing soda removes the unexposed film. Then he etches the aluminum with a commercial etchant of HCl and sodium persulfate (‽). To remove the exposed photoresist film and the inner epoxy liner of the Coca-Cola can he uses acetone. This produces somewhat uneven and rounded holes. Second, he tries milling with a “CNC 1419” desktop milling machine, using a 100μm conical milling cutter with a 30° included angle. His workholding is supergluing painter’s tape on the back of the aluminum to painter’s tape on a plywood spoilboard. (Stackup: plywood, stickum, paint backing, superglue, paint backing, stickum, aluminum can, air.) The calculated kerf is 207μm from the sum of the 100μm tip, the 200μm surface penetration, and the 30° included angle. FlatCAM ingests the Gerber and runs the mill. His cutting fluid is 3-in-1 oil. This one seems to be cut more precisely, though not quite as precisely as PCBWay’s laser-cut stainless stencil.
on 02024-05-09#video by #gomezgimenez on #manufacturing a digital clock that works by illuminating falling sand at 10Hz, all initially controlled by an Arduino (maybe a Mega, not sure), though later he got his own board fabbed with an onboard micro, looks like a PIC18F4550 actually, then soldered the parts down with a solder-paste stencil and hotplate reflow. Demonstrates some interesting #manufacturing techniques, such as CNC-routing a PCB with a D-bit with auto-bed-leveling sensed by conduction to the (coppper-clad) workpiece. Standard captive-nut technique for screwing together FDM 3-D prints and PCBs. Not sure why each digit requires 4 pixel columns of sand instead of 3. Because he’s modulating the timing of the sand release with the (16!) solenoids rather than the timing of the light flashes, he doesn’t have to worry about leakage of light between columns. Unfortunately you’d need a higher refresh rate than 10Hz for this to be practical; a 10Hz flicker is maximally distracting. Also the sand runs out in two minutes. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-05-09#video by #gomezgimenez on #manufacturing a digital clock that works by illuminating falling sand at 10Hz, all initially controlled by an Arduino (maybe a Mega, not sure), though later he got his own board fabbed with an onboard micro, looks like a PIC18F4550 actually, then soldered the parts down with a solder-paste stencil and hotplate reflow. Demonstrates some interesting #manufacturing techniques, such as CNC-routing a PCB with a D-bit with auto-bed-leveling sensed by conduction to the (coppper-clad) workpiece. Standard captive-nut technique for screwing together FDM 3-D prints and PCBs. Not sure why each digit requires 4 pixel columns of sand instead of 3. Because he’s modulating the timing of the sand release with the (16!) solenoids rather than the timing of the light flashes, he doesn’t have to worry about leakage of light between columns. Unfortunately you’d need a higher refresh rate than 10Hz for this to be practical; a 10Hz flicker is maximally distracting. Also the sand runs out in two minutes. #electronics #hardware
on 02024-05-09#video #toread about #manufacturing a simple DIY #ozone generator
on 02024-05-08#manufacturing a high-power #ozone generator #hardware #video using 3000 volts on each of several heatsunk plates to get corona discharge, plus a waterproof industrial fan to blow air through; he says the overall machine, with 3 modules totaling 12 plates, produces 120g/hour of ozone. The frame is welded up from steel structural tubing, with rivet nuts to add threads to the holes drilled in the tubing to which to screw the fan, ozone modules, frosted plexiglass side panels, aluminum top and bottom and fan panels, and air intake grille. The high-voltage wires have all the panels in parallel and are electrical-taped together, potted with household silicone inside a snap-together plastic conduit, zip-tied to the steel frame. He dremels holes in the side panels to epoxy-mount the electronic modules such as the timer, power meter, power entry module, and power switch. The modules’ screw terminals are potted in silicone presumably to prevent ozone damage. Uses about 350W. He doesn’t show the high-voltage power supply.
on 02024-04-06another carbide-tipped sawblade turned into an electric auger for digging I guess. He slits it with an angle grinder cutoff wheel, clamps it in a vise, softens it with a rooftop-tar-melting gas torch, and twists it into a helix with a wrench, then quenches it in water. Then he stick-welds it to a steel pipe, in which he nests a smaller steel pipe which he stick-welds in place, and then stick-welds the whole assembly onto a galvanized steel rod he had lying around, with about 100mm of extra steel rod sticking out the bottom, which he laboriously angle-grinds down to a rounded point. Then he grinds a cutting edge onto the leading edge of the auger, then touches it up with a file. Then he chucks it up in his Makita and digs a hole in the garden. #mechanical #manufacturing #video
on 02024-04-06Irene Sellars, file maker #manufacturing #video unfortunately just a talking head interview
on 02024-04-06Penknife cutler Stan Shaw, who died in 02021, in 01993 #manufacturing #video Confirms that the “pen blade” is for cutting quill pens, and demonstrates the use of a bow drill strung with pigskin, rotating around a horizontal axis and backed up by a breastplate so he can put his body weight behind the drill (though later he uses an electric drill press too). He’s not shy about running his file backwards across the brass or even the steel blades and nickel rivet pins. Something is wrong with the video, though, it cuts him off in the middle of a sentence more than once. He calls his humongous narrow belt sander a “power wheel” and sands the buffalo horn down by pressing it down onto the top of the wheel.
on 02024-04-06Norman Bayliss making moulding planes in 01962 #manufacturing #video #toread
on 02024-04-06#3D-printed metal vs. CNC #manufacturing #video #toread
on 02024-04-05#electroplating with gold after #3D-printing #video #manufacturing #toread
on 02024-04-05#manufacturing an LCD #hardware #video #bootstrapping #toread
on 02024-04-05Reinforcing #3D-printed plastic parts (in this case a PETG axe handle) with stainless steel window screens, which have enough space between the wires to allow interlayer bonding. Probably around here fiberglass is the best option. He cut the screens to size but not shape with tin snips, then trimmed them after printing with the kind of small diagonal cutters used for trimming through-hole leads or zip ties. I thought maybe he would put them in between all the layers, but he seems to have stuck to just a single layer on the bottom, another on the top, and a totally useless one in the middle. For final trimming he resorted to dremeling off the wires with a cutoff disc, eventually deciding that’s just way too hard to make it safe to handle. #manufacturing #video
on 02024-04-05Japanese alcohol soldering blowtorch #video #toread #manufacturing
on 02024-04-05#Fraser building a lampwork blowtorch #bootstrapping #manufacturing #video shows different oil lamp designs. He’s going to use a bellows and a check valve with a balloon reservoir I guess? Sort of like a pneumatic buck converter. Probably doesn’t have a bladder to use. Before he gets into #glassworking he demonstrates soldering copper with it. He’s using a check valve explained by Faraday, using a latex diaphragm similar to a bicycle Dunlop valve, though Faraday used cloth. He decided to use an (99% isopropyl) alcohol lamp instead of an oil lamp to get higher power and less smoke. On the fifth attempt he succeeded at sealing a test tube into a Hermetically sealed ampoule.
on 02024-04-05#Rinoa runs her 1920s Lenk Duplex Automatic Alcohol Blowtorch No.175 for the first time. #video #manufacturing
on 02024-04-05how 19th-century files were made #manufacturing #video by #Ken-Hawley, MBE, died 02014
on 02024-04-05#bootstrapping a handheld metal smith’s forge (but you can’t hold it while you’re using it) #manufacturing #video #toread
on 02024-04-04#Destin #manufacturing by progressive stamping #video at T&C Stamping in Athens, Alabama, distinguishing progressive stamping (which is of a continuous strip, and is what they do) from transfer stamping, showing hemmed edges to protect spark-plug wires from abrasion. They made 35–40 million blender blades for a company they don’t want to talk about last year, among other things. “We process, I think it’s 10 million pounds [of sheet metal] a year. (...) We’re a mid-size stamper.” I think that refers to the size of presses they operate.
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward #manufacturing an earthen oil lamp #bootstrapping #ceramics #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing an unnecessarily complex geared mechanical pencil #video #toread #machining
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing a springless air-powered graver #video #toread #machining
on 02024-04-03#machining a crazy (helical) part on the lathe from brass by moving a jaw on a 3-jaw chuck #video #manufacturing
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward #bootstrapping #ceramics into #manufacturing a mug #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing soap from wood ash and fat #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing a very nice basket from pine needles and thread #bootstrapping #video #toread
on 02024-04-03#Fraser builds an 800-year-old blowtorch or "blow lamp" design: a terracotta #ceramics oil lamp, sealed by being cooked in milk and then coated in linseed oil, blown with a copper mouth blowpipe. It works to solder copper wire. He built two separate wicks onto his oil lamp so he can light the larger wick when he wants more power, and eventually used a 3-D printer hotend for the blowing aperture. He recommends T.P. Danger’s 19th-century book “Art of Glassblowing” for lampwork and scientific glassblowing information. And of course one way to make a blowpipe is by glassblowing. #bootstrapping #video #manufacturing
on 02024-04-03distilling H₂SO₄. #materials #manufacturing #video recommends taping joints with teflon which can withstand the stuff at its 336° boiling point, using a stirring hotplate to eliminate bumping (boiling chips weren’t enough), using a short-path distillation apparatus, and putting the whole apparatus in a polypropylene bin (which will melt from the heat if there's a spill, but give you a few seconds to get away). He suggests sand or cat litter in the bin would contain it better. He uses differences in refractive index to detect when the new distillate is the same density as the stuff in the receiving vial. #bootstrapping
on 02024-04-03against microwave kilns #video about #manufacturing #ceramics. The dude has been firing “copper clay”, previously with I guess a blowtorch? And melting parts of a lot of his pieces instead of just sintering them. He thinks the susceptor on the one he bought is carborundum. It’s black, anyway. He’s using an 850W microwave, set for 8 minutes, and some “kiln paper” to prevent sticking. He also puts kiln paper under the kiln to keep it from heating up the glass turntable, which he says was getting “worryingly hot”. The inside of the kiln glows orange. He quenches the copper in water, which seems like it would be a bad idea with ceramics, but he says is required with “metal clay” (presumably copper and silver but not gold). He says the kiln stays hot for 5–6' after opening. But you shouldn’t buy it because it’s inherently dangerous and the manufacturer is anonymous, and speculates it might explode if overfired (it won’t).
on 02024-04-03#CNC-Kitchen #video about calibrating #3D-printing devices (especially DIY 3-D printers) for #manufacturing #precision, discussing elephant-foot, corner over-extrusion, over- and under-extrusion, and skew (non-perpendicular X and Y axes). He recommends Vector3D’s £5 CaliFlower calibration STL file, which offers inside and outside measurements in X and Y over 50 and 100 mm, and then diagonal measurements of 100mm. With chamfers on the top and bottom to prevent elephant foot.
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing the world’s largest ridable hexapod, Megahex. Built out of six bargain-basement hydraulic excavators. At least two hydraulic-fluid ruptures in the video. Gradually they got the mean time to failure from one step, to two steps, to six steps... and then gave up. #video #hacksmith
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing a fractal ball vise. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video He fills the ball with scrap steel as aggregate in concrete to make it heavier and I guess more massive for hammering. Basically it’s a weighted concrete near-sphere with a PLA skin resting on a rubber O-ring on a concrete base.
on 02024-04-03adding metal parts to #3D-printing plastic with FDM. This seems to be a Stratasys ad. His first example is 3-D printing toothed-belt pulleys for a metal roller-chain sprocket; he pauses the print in the middle to insert the sprockets, which the rest of the plastic captures. Also mentions cartridge bearings, captured hex nuts (cheaper than brass inserts, more resistant to rotation and pullout), and a captured bronze bushing, also inserted during a printing pause. Another technique he shows is inserting 3-D printed parts into a 3-D-printed assembly during a printing pause in order to get the same fully-captured benefit without needing support material for overhangs. Then he demonstrates inserting roller chain and metal-screen filters during printing pauses, and inserting carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic rods during printing pauses to stiffen quadcopter arms. #manufacturing #video
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing and #electroplating #tutorial with graphite. He’s using an LCD SLA printer to get nice smooth prints and graphite spray paint, but shows that some graphite paints are not compatible with some automotive body work putties, because the paint cracks. He’s measuring 12.5kΩ between points a few centimeters apart, which is similar to what I get with a pencil on paper, but after he burnishes it with a towel, he gets only 5kΩ. To burnish his Benchy he tumbles it in walnut shells for four hours. He uses an unspecified commercial bright acid copper electrolyte for the initial plating, using coffee filters for the anode bags on his copper anodes. He recommends using a constant-current power supply with 1A/dm² while rotating the workpiece, but he suggests also using the voltage (0.6–1.0V) to tell if your current setting is right! He gets a lovely mirror finish with his trade-secret electrolyte composition, but then sands and buffs it. Before plating gold, nickel, or silver over the copper, he suggests galvanic degreasing, using a stainless steel anode and 6V; he applies gold with a galvanic brush (electrolyte not disclosed) and 6 volts. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video #electrolysis
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing a casting pattern, the quick and dirty way, using a Prusa I3 MK3S FDM printer, using a plastic called PVB, brand #Polycast, “designed to burn out very cleanly”. Dude is wearing my slogan. Lots of time-wasting talking-head footage. He also mentions you can smooth the prints with isopropanol, and that he was able to glue it that way too. He brushed plaster on the surface of his print so he wouldn’t have to degas his plaster. He recommends casting in Zamak, which he melts in a soup can, rather than aluminum, and using hardware store ductwork sealed with aluminum HVAC tape to hold the plaster. To my surprise he claims Zamak is cheaper than aluminum, and that most plumbing fixtures and towel racks are Zamak, both of which I think are wrong. #manufacturing #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing 12 tools: a parallelogram center finder (in which M3 bolts for use as pivots cut their own threads) for boards or square tubing; a square-corner center finder for circles or squares; a center finder for a drill press for centering the drill over round stock with a sort of indicator needle, also with a non-self-tapping screw tapping its own hole; a metric screw measuring gauge with both length and diameter, bas-relief labels colored with a sharpie; a similar fillet gauge; a lockable angle gauge for transferring angles; a lockable contour gauge (like a one-dimensional bed of nails, or a pack of cards, as one commenter suggests), with more self-threading bolts, M4 this time, and a cam lever for locking; a sanding block; tiny “paint cones” for supporting objects being spray-painted on points; the THWACK plastic hammer; a flexure-based tube cutter into which you screw a box-cutter blade, which makes “extremely nice flat cuts” on the ends of silicone tubes; a machine vises with a screw clamping mechanism; a Kant-Twist-style clamp. He also calls out things he didn't print, like a Dremel table-saw/disc-sander/shaper mounting, a hand-held drill guide for guaranteeing perpendicular drill movement, etc. #video #manufacturing #mechanisms #teaching-tech
on 02024-04-03#Clough42 #electroplating with nickel to prevent rust. He’s using 2ℓ vinegar and 1 tbsp salt, strips of nickel he bought off Amazon, using 3A through about 8000mm² of nickel strip to make his nickel acetate bath, without anode bags. He got 26 volts at 3A and 18 volts at 2A so I guess there’s a lot of ohmic losses in his bath, which dropped over time. Eventually he dropped the current to 2A because he was worried about melting his plastic tub. After a couple of hours he got noticeable uneven nickel deposits on the cathode. His nickel deposits on his nickel cathode were not very smooth and easily came off. On copper they did adhere. He made the mistake of trying to use vinyl gloves with acetone to clean his workpieces. In the saturated bath he got 6.3 volts at 3 amps when he was plating his first (steel) workpiece, which dropped to 5.5 volts when he moved the anodes closer. Half an hour gave him a coating that survived motorized buffing. Top comment by the current president of the National Association of Surface Finishing trade association explaining why you shouldn’t do this. #manufacturing #video #plating
on 02024-04-03#3D-printing without layer lines using “fuzz”. He gave up on #manufacturing with a resin 3-D printer because he kept getting warped parts. Lots of timewasting talking-head footage, which is aggravated by the shitty background elevator music (#Jake-Grim). He tried texturing the surface with Blender first, but didn’t know how to use it, so ended up using the “Fuzzy skin” feature in Bambu Studio; with 0.3mm "fuzz distance" and 0.3mm fuzz thickness, the texture is similar to the texture of his heated bed. A commenter suggests using variable layer height. #video
on 02024-04-03#Proper-Printing #3D-printing gel of UV-curable resin, as if with FDM, maybe filled with silica fume to thicken it. He was able to do vase-mode printing but not bridging. #manufacturing #mechanical #video
on 02024-04-03bringing home cooking gas in big polyethylene bags in Pakistan #video apparently it’s propane though because it’s not floating up into the air and it’s not coming out of the tank (?) as a mist. Often they have a several-meter-long rope to the other end of the bag to hold it up vertically. At home they hang the bag outside with a transparent hose running inside, using a small electric water pump to suck it out of the bag. A brass valve is taped into one end of the bag to hose-clamp the hose to. The very long flames coming out of the burner also look like propane. Later they demonstrate a Kia car (license plate obscured!) up on a scissors jack using a temporarily removed passenger-side front wheel as a power takeoff to grind wheat into flour, driving the flour mill via a couple of U-joints. Not sure if this is related other than also happening in Pakistan. Then there’s a third apparently unrelated video about sawing wet concrete (?) into large blocks by hand, then carving them to the desired shape with an axe and a series of other steel implements, possibly not even in Pakistan. Ingenious #manufacturing technique but apparently nothing to do with the first two. Then there’s a segment about making mochi in Japan.
on 02024-04-03#jimmydiresta on #manufacturing with the bandsaw (9 beginner mistakes) #video: using the blade that came with the machine or using a stamped blade, with the consequence that it begins “drifting” (he likes 14tpi Timber Wolf blades from Suffolk machinery for wood, MDF, brass, and aluminum); trying to cut into a round object or a natural shape like a tree branch on the bandsaw, without fixturing them down first with for example a screw clamp flat against the table; “high-siding”, cutting things that are not well supported on the table (you can support them by sticking another piece of wood through the blade below them); using the shitty plastic table support that comes with the saw; cutting relief cuts for a curve cut to prevent making concave pieces of wood; not cutting relief cuts (tangent to the curve) when making a curve cut with a wide blade; flicking away small pieces of waste with your fingers or not at all, rather than with a fat pencil with a rubber eraser; pulling the blade off the bandsaw trying to get out of a deep curved cut (“just turn it off”, he advises). He also recommends rotating material 180° after a test cut to see if your table is square to the blade. This guy is fucking incredible on the bandsaw.
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing acetone #materials from eggs by eating the shell with vinegar to make INS 263 and then dry-distilling it. He says he got 20% yield. He started by cooking the shells to burn up the organics, but not really enough, so he only succeeded in charring them, which he regrets and doesn’t recommend; it made the whole process smell unbelievably terrible until he removed the waste products. After weeks of digestion in vinegar, he added activated charcoal from a water filter in the middle, decanted it, strained it through a screen, filtered it through a cotton ball, and got a brownish transparent solution. After a second decantation step he let it dry for a few more weeks to crystallize acetate crystals in bizarre hollow cauliflower shapes. I think he probably could have purified it a bit at this stage by only doing a partial crystallization, but he let it dry completely. Then it rehydrated from the air and became soft, no longer stinking of burnt corpse. He says it requires about 400° to decompose, not 160° as Wikipedia says, so he had to switch from his hotplate to a heating mantle he made from plaster and a hair dryer heating element, which burned out immediately, so he made another one. The distillation then produced a flammable orange liquid, probably mostly acetone. Naturally his shitty plaster heating mantle started crumbling. Perhaps he wasn’t cooling his distillation enough, because he lost a lot of white vapor, though he says it was side products. Because the heating mantle reached red heat, his borosilicate round-bottom flask melted somewhat, cracked from the temperature gradient, and melted some holes in the bottom. As a replacement distillation vessel, he drilled an empty butane cylinder (underwater to keep the drillbit cool and prevent air from contacting any potential sparks), filled it with water to drive out the butane, then drilled bigger holes and used it as his dry distillation flask. To purify the orange acetone, he started with fractional distillation, getting a light yellow acetone. Cleaning the distillation flask was very difficult, requiring not just a base bath but sanding. For a second fractional distillation of the yellow stuff he used a hotplate oil bath and 500mm of distillation column, wrapped in aluminum foil, obtaining almost colorless acetone. A third fractional distillation removed the remaining color, but it still smelled burnt. So naturally he refluxed the acetone with a giant quantity of KMnO₄ for 15–20 hours, then did another fractional distillation to get the acetone back out, at long last eliminating the burnt stench. Then he tried another purification with aqueous silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide as recommended in Vogel’s “Text-Book of Practical Organic Chemistry”, third edition, leaving a black gunk in his flask which had to be cleaned with nitric acid. Another fractional distillation removed most of the water, and finally calcium sulfate hemihydrate removed the remaining water, though not before he broke his hotplate and his camping stove trying to dry the sulfate. An additional distillation separates the dry acetone from the plaster. Then to try to get the yield above 20% he tried re-purifying some of the fractions discarded during the various distillations with the silver-oxide method mentioned earlier, followed by KMnO₄, at which point he regretted adding so much at once, because the acetone started boiling from the reaction before he could dunk the erlenmeyer in a water bath, at which point he gave up. #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-03#AvE on #manufacturing tools for engines, etc. He’s trying to recycle aluminum (and having trouble with oxide), fixing a minor crash on his Haas CNC mill which bent the sheet metal covering one side of the Z-axis accordion (no replacement part listed), and cremating a dead mouse. After pounding the bent part into shape on his vise with a hammer, he welds it back into the cover. Aluminum HVAC tape covers a multitude of welding sins. Aluminum chunks on top of the aluminum turnings enabled all the aluminum to melt together rather than remaining separated by their oxides. #video
on 02024-04-03#Clickspring on #manufacturing carbon steel hairsprings for #mechanical watches #video
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing DDNP poof-powder #materials (01969 Army field manual procedure) #video
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing ethane (R170) #materials for refrigerant (for the second stage of a cascade). His R600a tabletop icemaker compressor was able to condense CO₂ and N₂O despite only reaching 10 bar, but only barely handled ethylene, which he had made by running ethanol through Al₂O₃ at 450°. So he’s making ethane by Kolbe #electrolysis of sodium acetate on a platinum anode, liberating CO₂, which he has to remove with a Ca(OH)₂ scrubber. To avoid producing lye and thus oxygen, he includes an excess of acetate, in the form of vinegar; he got a weird oil making the sodium acetate. He uses ABS putty dissolved in acetone to seal his electrolysis electrode junctions inside an ABS sleeve he 3-D printed. He switched to using a float switch because his conductivity probe made of two stainless-steel screws was failing, maybe because of the oil. Includes Faraday calculations from first principles. Demonstrates burning soap bubbles of C₂H₆/CO₂ squeezed out of a syringe. He didn’t use enough vinegar, so his pH rose to 9.6, meaning that this process is an effective way to make alkali (probably Na₂CO₃, as evidenced by CO₂ bubbles when he adds more vinegar), since the anion turns into gas. With the pH at 5.6 he got 1.08ℓ/hour of gas from 700mA, close to the theoretical 0.94. His scrubber and gas drier are two packed-bed jam jars with pipes and hoses glued onto their lids and bases, sitting on 3-D-printed supports. By spraying liquid ethane all over the place after precooling it to -12° with his first refrigeration stage, he gets to -90°. He thinks a PbO₂ anode would work too. #video #Hyperspace-Pirate
on 02024-04-03#Xyla-Foxlin #manufacturing an Adirondack chair with solar power #video advertising Anker’s 6kW “portable” rollaround battery, which lets her charge up to run high-power tools like her Tormach CNC mill over a long period of time. And actually it turns out her house doesn’t have enough power for the CNC router. She’s CNC-routing all the chair parts out of emerald birch plywood, a pure sheet-cutting design, but then runs all the pieces over her router table with a roundover bit to round the corners. The chairs look amazing.
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing #ceramics in a 01978 Amana RadaRange microwave oven he got for US$15 #video (kind of stupid, this guy Erik Gellert has no idea how to make this actually work, and just ends up drying out his plastic clay and getting some steam explosions)
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing a #cold-plasma torch for bio lab sterilization. You stick a needle or a thin nichrome wire in a quartz capillary tube and, some distance down the tube, a metal washer (or piece of brass tubing with no sharp edges) around it. Then you power them with a ZVS driver and flyback transformer, and blow argon through the RF spark between them. After 17 attempts over a year, he finally built a practical version. A delrin spacer kept the high-voltage electrode from directly touching his outer acrylic tube; a similar teflon spacer kept the “washer” from touching the acrylic. This was because the acrylic was becoming charged and attracting the plasma, keeping it from escaping the torch. He plans to publish a paper on how to do it. #Thought-Emporium #video
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing #ceramics by pit-firing in your back yard #video full of bullshit about pores in pottery opening with heat and closing when cooling, confusing grog with tempers in general, how “mineral vapors” produce different colors, etc., plus lots of useless footage of some guy talking to the camera #pseudoscience #misinformation
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward on #manufacturing #ceramics from store-bought materials in the city. Some talking-head filler. But mostly he buys clay at Hobby Lobby and makes pottery from it with pottery tools from Michaels (another craft store) and fires it in his yard. It’s probably a ball clay body, Hobby Lobby Moist Pottery Clay X-15. He tempers the clay with a bunch of sand from a nearby dry wash riddled through a screen from his house window. He coils the pot in a thrift-store bowl, protected with a wet handkerchief; the bowl allows him to rotate it. Before firing he stone-burnishes it with petrified wood. To protect his driveway from burn marks, he dumps another bucket of sand on it. He preheats the pot in the kitchen oven to dry it, then uses three bricks on the sand to make a sort of three-stone stove to hold up the greenware pot, then fills up the rest of the fire pit with charcoal briquets. He builds the fire pit three bricks tall, without mortar, puts an upside-down metal bucket (US$19) over the pot to prevent the charcoal above it from damaging it, and covers the top of the charcoal with a barbecue grill supporting large pot shards to keep the heat in. His thermocouple registers 700°, and the pot did sinter properly despite the clay being labeled for cone 5 (about 1100°). In total he spent US$97. He calls the three-brick technique “urban Anasazi”, crediting Tony Soares. #video
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing a carved chain out of a fossil rock #video. He starts by squaring up the rock into a square prism with wet cutting on a diamond table saw. Then he built a jig above the rock saw to allow him to cut it into a 36mm-across plus-sign-shaped prism, with 12mm-thick strokes in the +, with the top 12mm edge of the diamond blade. Then he marked chain link outlines along sides of the arms of the + with a cardboard template and a white paint marker. More table-sawing roughs out the links. A dremel flex shaft with a cutoff wheel allows him to slit the insides of the links. A diamond core drill in a drill press cuts the center of the first and last links out, underwater in tupperware. More table-sawing removes some more waste stone. Links in the middle are separated with a smaller diamond core drill underwater in the drill press, drilling in from both sides to meet in the middle; then a tiny 1mm drillbit in the Dremel, drilling underwater, removes some more thin slices, but several such drillbits broke. Finally a better one worked, but he was dipping it in water rather than drilling underwater. Drilling in with the tiny drill at an angle from all sides allowed the chain links to separate. A Kingsley North diamond drum grinder, similar to a common bench grinder, permitted freehand rounding of the still fairly square chain links; a Dremel diamond drum worked similarly to fillet and round the inside surfaces. For surface finish he wet-sanded it by hand with 220-grit sandpaper, followed by something else with a name like “Zam” or “Zeum”. A beautiful, shining black oil-shale chain full of fossils.
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing stone spheres cheaply #video on using diamond hole saws to grind down a rock with an electric drill while it’s mounted on an unpowered spindle (via a superglued dowel in a hole made with a smaller hole saw), allowing you to slowly rotate it around a second axis as you spherify it with the large hole saw under a faucet during an hour and a half. Then the dude sands it down in his hand, also under the faucet, with a velcro cup sanding attachment for his drill and a series of carborundum grits for a couple minutes ach: 400, 600, 800, 1000, 5000, 10000. Pretty beautiful. Still seems like a lot of manual work for something that looks easy to automate.
on 02024-04-03#manufacturing nose-picking brass automata with pewter-casting in silicone, among other things #video
on 02024-04-03making a wax seal #video by #Uri-Tuchman. Lots of #manufacturing brass and wood parts on a lathe, pantograph, handsaw, bandsaw, router table, hand file, etc. He tried making a form for the pantograph with an Elegoo LCD SLA printer, modeling it in Blender, but gave up. #3D-printing
on 02024-04-03A note from 02022 on the #Monome: “Scarcity and Precarity in Small Manufacturing”: “To lead with an actual case: we have not been able to get the STM32 microcontroller used in the Crow (and Grid) for well over two years now, and all estimates are “unknown” (the words from various sales reps I’ve spoken to, ie those at Mouser). Since we’ve sold out and also exhausted our backup-repair-stock, if someone contacts us with a hardware-related break-- for example, somehow the STM32 is fried-- there’s basically nothing we can do (that was previously standard procedure). (...) previously the parts would just go to e-waste since new components were widely available and irrationally cheap.
We are no longer in that era. So I’d like to instill this message, as strongly as possible: your machines are not easily repairable. They may be incredibly difficult (interpret: expensive) or impossible to repair. Please let this inform your treatment and expectations of the machines in your life.” #small-is-beautiful #collapse #hardware #manufacturing #shortages #WWIII #uxn
on 02024-02-06#video from 01987 about the #Acorn #Archimedes and the origin of the #ARM, including an #interview with Sophie Wilson featuring the term “order codes”, and some machine specs for the 305, 310, 410, and 440. It comes with optional built-in “Econet”, which turns out to be 800kbps RS-422. Features footage of PCB rework, pick-and-place machines, and “flow soldering”, which I think is not quite wave soldering. Inspiring examples of what you can do with 4 MIPS, 1 MiB RAM, and I guess a TrueColor display, including real-time 3-D with hundreds of flat-shaded polygons. #manufacturing #history #retrocomputing
on 02023-07-02why semiconductor #manufacturing doesn’t happen in #USA
on 02022-02-09#Shenzhen #manufacturing #shanzhai knockoff products
on 02016-10-17#pdf #paper on automatically modifying #topology-optimization results for #3D-printing (in this case, FDM), which mysteriously doesn’t seem to have considered incorporating the #manufacturing constraints into the objective function.
on 02016-09-22#metamaterials (“mesostructures”) via #3D-printing in order to achieve customized and graded elasticity. Still, they seem to just be replacing struts with coils, mostly, although there are some other #flexures mentioned. #manufacturing
on 02016-09-22#pdf #paper with lots of results of #topology-optimization made by #3D-printing. They wrote and published a MATLAB program called TOPSlicer to translate topology-optimization results to useful formats. #manufacturing
on 02016-09-22#pdf #paper on “Multiple-Material #Topology-Optimization of Compliant Mechanisms (#mechanical #flexures) Created Via PolyJet #3D-Printing”. It says that multiple materials has the potential to eliminate the need for thin, weak sections. (PolyJet is a process that selectively deposits either of two liquid resin monomers and polymerizes them with UV. One of the resins is an elastomer.) Their results do not seem to justify that level of enthusiasm, as they still contain thin, weak sections, and they don’t seem to have measured the output force. #manufacturing
on 02016-09-22A 2012 #paper on design for #3D-printing #manufacturing in metals. Not much about topology optimization AFAICT.
on 02016-09-22Nadya Peek’s (and James Coleman, Ben Peters, Matt Hirsch, and Ilan Moyer’s) modular reconfigurable motion stages. #manufacturing
on 02016-09-16Fab Academy Cardboard Machine Kit 2016 (although a lot of the machines seem to be laser-cut #MDF). Posted by Nadya Peek (nadya on Vimeo). #manufacturing
on 02016-09-16a chart of different kinds of #adhesives #materials for #manufacturing
on 02016-09-11More about #surface-grinder #manufacturing #hardware
on 02016-09-11A "surface grinder" is apparently a grinding wheel mounted for #machining precise amounts off of a surface (with a precision down to about 2.5 μm) on a part held with low-distortion means (typically a magnetic chuck) on a movable table. #manufacturing #hardware
on 02016-09-11#manufacturing a #2d-cutting coffee-table design with a #CNC router; design is cc by-nc-sa, and DXF files are available.
on 02016-09-02More about #laser-cutter #CNC #manufacturing, including more about corner divots (inside divots, outside divots, and point divots aka overcut corners), edge laps, spiral spring seat cushions, etc. #2d-cutting
on 02016-08-16Guerrilla guide to #CNC #machining, mold making, and resin casting, by Michal Zalewski (Michał Załewski?, aka #lcamtuf @coredump.cx). #manufacturing #introduction
on 02016-08-11OpenKnit is an open-source knitting machine by Gerald Rubio, who then went on to found Kniterate, but then stopped working on OpenKnit #knitting #textile #manufacturing
on 02016-06-29OpenKnit is an open-source #knitting machine by Gerald Rubio #textile #manufacturing
on 02016-06-29a router lathe copying a table leg by carving it out of a log within a few minutes. Looks like insanely dangerous #manufacturing.
on 02016-06-14#topology-optimization #software for #3D design and #manufacturing, in Python. MIT X11 license.
on 02015-12-10#video describing “FlatFab”, proprietary (but CC-BY licensed!) research software for design for #planar #3D #manufacturing. Doesn’t seem to incorporate flexures, but does do some physical modeling.
on 02015-11-30files for #laser-cutter #manufacturing of smooth curves and finger joints for a pen stand. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-30overview of the #BRL-CAD MGED #3D geometry editor interface, noting that its interface is “not discoverable”, but it’s the primary geometry editor. #manufacturing #CAD
on 02015-11-30Explains that in #laser-cutter design for finger joint #manufacturing, you might want to curve the finger (“tooth”) edges a bit to allow for the kerf. No numbers on how far to curve, unfortunately. Does have Ponoko cost numbers from 2008, and mentions that approximating curves with lines “reduces cutting costs significantly”. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-30Delrin (acetal) #materials properties and design guide #manufacturing #pdf
on 02015-11-30#laser-cutter cutting isn’t quite perpendicular to the surface of at least Delrin (acetal), but rather slightly tapered. Also explains that 12.7mm is necessary for a press fit in metals #manufacturing, but acetal can handle less precise fits.
on 02015-11-30super-brief #tutorial on #3D #finite-element analysis of a CAD object before #manufacturing: generate STL, generate a mesh from the STL using NETGEN, export it to DIFFPACK, use dolfin-convert to convert it to XML so FEniCS can read it, and then analyze it using FEniCS Viper.
on 02015-11-30#laser-cutter #manufacturing of non-planar #3D objects by softening acrylic with the defocused laser, allowing gravity to pull it into shape. Got Best #Paper in CHI 2013.
on 02015-11-30VisiCut is a “user-friendly tool for #laser-cutting” #fabrication #manufacturing. Under the LGPL. Part of Thomas Oster’s bachelor’s thesis.
on 02015-11-30NINETY PERCENT of consumer electronics #manufacturing is done in #Shenzhen, #China, which contains 15 million people. RCA is now owned by Shenzhen-based TCL, which has just opened a new factory in Poland to keep labor costs down. 100 new companies are registered in Shenzhen each day.
on 02015-11-16a linear ball bearing to allow low-friction free sliding on a ground 8mm shaft. #manufacturing
on 02015-11-16explanations of machinability ratings for #manufacturing by #machining.
on 02015-11-16more on planar #manufacturing of #snap-fit joints on a #laser-cutter in e.g. acrylic. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-16#manufacturing of “bolted” T-joints in acrylic on a #laser-cutter using Delrin clips instead of bolts. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-16planar #manufacturing of #snap-fit joints on a #laser-cutter in e.g. acrylic. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-16how to design panels to make on a #laser-cutter or other #CNC #manufacturing machine to be assembled into things, including inside corner divots, clips, finger joints, box joints, coplanar joints (including fully interlocking bulbed versions), Kanelba hinges, #flexures including the Snijlab living hinge (aka the lattice hinge), and whatnot. #2d-cutting
on 02015-11-12handibot is a handheld CNC power tool. #manufacturing #machining
on 02015-11-12Make's coverage of Dan #Gelbart’s #manufacturing videos.
on 02015-08-16“No test has ever worn out a properly designed and molded [living] hinge of homo-polymer polypropylene”. #flexures #manufacturing
on 02015-08-16the resources page on MIT’s precision machine design (and #machining and #manufacturing) course.
on 02015-08-16#Polar-3D is a #CNC #3D-printer using polar coordinates to get multiple print heads, which don’t have to move, and avoid linear actuators and linear bearings entirely, except for a Z-axis which raises and lowers the whole table, including the motors. Also, the platters provide precisely known movement for a laser #3D scanner, thus avoiding #photometric-stereo and the like. #video #manufacturing
on 02015-08-13#Snap-fit joints for #Plastics, from Bayer Material Science. Lots of handy diagrams of strain distribution. #3D #design #spring #manufacturing
on 02015-08-10Other Machine is full of women (11 of 21 employees) #feminism #startups #manufacturing
on 02015-08-05#Gun #manufacturing for #Mexico drug cartels in Jalisco.
on 02015-08-05