Dallas Makerspace Show and Tell - August 2017

Post a picture and description of anything you are working on this month at the 'Space here!

It can be anything from a small craft project to a large CNC router project to building a table to 3D printing to a science experiment and so much more. There are lots of people doing cool things at DMS all the time, but most of us don’t get to see it. Post it here and share the interesting things you are doing at Dallas Makerspace this month!

Posting here helps not only promote Dallas Makerspace, but could inspire others to make something. It will also help PR post a monthly look at what can be done here on a blog post (with attribution to each maker of course).


:bulb: NOTE: Please try to include the following on each post, to help make for richer blog content!

  • a decent QUALITY photo
  • a notation about WHAT you’ve made
  • WHO you are (for attribution on the blog)
  • HOW you’ve made it
  • and WHY
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Made a wrench for the machine shop lathe. I wanted to use as much of the material that I had left, so I broke it up into 2 pieces. Then TIG welded it together. First weld I got contaminants in the weld from the table on one end of the weld, so I ground it off. When I went to fill that, I inadvertently used the wrong end of the rod. By wrong end I mean not clean/ previously used with porosity. So I called it. Lol.



This wrench is to hold a backup to fix when a shear pin is sheared.

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Nice! I’m jealous because I couldn’t get into the BYOC, waited in the digital line for hours…

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Here is my creation made during Astrud’s class tonight (Block Printing with inked stamps). What a great class! We learned how to carve in personal designs. I recommend her class to anyone interested in block printing. Astrud is very thorough in her explanations and always has some good tips on where to buy material- with coupons!

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Turned “Dr Seuss Jar”. Bottom is burled oak (thank you @mkart), lid is walnut on the bottom and pear (thank you @mblatz) is the spire with the ball at the top.

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We had the first SMD class, and the six who registered signed up, and we had one walk in plus a training for a future teacher of the class. Everyone walked away with working DMS blinky badges!








Art and I have ordered another batch of boards, so we should have the next class late this month or early next month if you want one of these blinky badges

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Here’s a picture of just the Blinky. Walter had the PC boards printed and silk screened with the DMS logo, The class soldered the tiny SMD components. You find out right away that you’re soldering skills need some work, but it was a lot of fun making the blinky. (No Arduino required)

Thanks Walter for your patience with us on the soldering and for the excellent instruction. Now if we could just put a simple switch on it so you don’t have to remove the battery to keep it from running down.

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These walnut chairs have full mortise-and-tenon joinery. The parts were predominantly pin-routed, using fixtures laser cut at DMS. Arms and legs are two parts in order to leverage grain direction. The arms and legs are tapered in addition to being shaped, so I needed mirror-image twins of each. I made more fixtures than I made parts!

I used the band saw to cut the wooden forms for the cushions. They will someday be upholstered with thin white leather.

IMG_6168a1_600px

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Next on the lathe for me, wood and wire sculpture. “Bonsai”

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The headlamp assemblies on my 2003 Ranger are at end-of-life. I could use one of the snake oil polishing compounds on the market to remove the haze, but the UV-resistant coating is long gone and the haze would soon return since none of them can protect the polycarbonate lens anything close to the original hardcoat.

New vs old. The trained eye should be able to spot the difference:

Complete:

Now the fun process of alignment. As is usual for replacements, one of the alignment fasteners on each is all but immovable (takes more torque to spin the anchor than one can exert against a PH2 head through the soft steel), so it’s not going to be pretty.

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Some more photos from the block printing class. The next block printing class is up on the schedule, and you can grab your spot here:
https://calendar.dallasmakerspace.org/events/view/3298
print04group01print03group02print01print02

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T-Nuts Make Compound Rest Secure (Again)

The threading got stripped on one of the two bolts that secure the compound rest to the cross slide on the small metal lathe at my home. Rather than simply getting a new bolt, I decided to “design a better mouse trap”, took some measurements, went to MakerSpace and machined two T-Nut inserts.

These small parts were machined using the Bridgeport Milling Machine from a scrap piece of steel and the home lathe is fully operational again. The picture on the left is a close-up of the parts and the picture on the right shows them installed.

(I decided to share the pictures because a number of members came by while I was working to see what I was making and to watch the progress.)

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It was nice to watch you work! You should totally teach a class on how to make these. We can certainly use more of them for our machines here at the Makerspace!

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Here’s Taz done in low relief for a wallet back stamp. Cut into Aluminum using the HAAS. cheers!

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Wine closet is done. Thanks to wood shop folks and @AlexRhodes for the training

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I now have most of the parts in hand that I need for phase 2 of the '03 Ranger lighting upgrade: the relay mod.

What’s a relay mod you ask? Vehicles equipped with halogen headlamps often have wires that are simply too small to supply adequate current to their headlamps, reducing output well below what they are rated for. The automakers do this to save money - thinner wires are cheaper and they’d rather just switch the power through that switch on the dash/stalk than use relays. It’s common to use 18 and 20 gauge wires for this task rather than the 14+ gauge wires you really need.

By installing relays, you can improve the brightness of your headlamps markedly using otherwise OEM parts. Daniel Stern explains this well and offers fantastic customized customer service should you be interested in this yourself.

Here’s a sketch of how I plan on implementing this scheme on my Ranger:

Ordinarily, the factory harness just plugs into the headlamps. For this modification, I will preserve the factory harness but use it to control the relays that switch power to the headlamps via much shorter wire runs via heavier-gauge wire.

Using fuses on both sides of the relay is a tad silly, but I happen to have a 6-position fuse block and that’s how I sketched it in. In reality, I’ll likely reduce it to the HI and LO common fuses for simplicity’s sake, to reduce the number of contacts I have to make, and to save 'block capacity for future projects.

Next up: finalizing the design, sourcing wire (16/18 gauge for signalling and an appropriate heavier gauge for power) and nailing down wire lengths for the actual harness layout.

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Making rockets with @Nick and C. J.

Making rockets with Andrew “Zoz” Brooks.

PGI 3" comets

Another Texan making a Girandola

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