Dallas Makerspace Show and Tell - January 2017

Made a sheet of multicolor stickers on the Vinyl Cutter (thanks to @LisaSelk for the second pair of hands) for my wife’s car.

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Still have some advice to follow on these (she was SOOO bossy about it - jk)
But they it was well accepted. More to come since this fits well with wife’s business…

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Ewige Blumenkraft! <!dsafvhbeiuhb>

A couple of months back I found an old edger blade in the middle of the road. It was right next to my door while I was stopped at a light. I opened the door and picked it up. What to do with such a used up piece of metal?

I decided to make a pair of knives from it. I know the metal is probably not ideal for knife making, but I wanted to practice making a knife. I used a cutoff wheel to cut two blanks from the edger blade. Used the hole in the blade as finger hold and cut the edger blade in two.

Then I shaped it on a grinder and sander at home. I added a pair of ironwood knife scales that I cut from some cutoffs I bought a while back, drilled some holes for the brass pins and glued it up. Then I sanded it down to shape the handles. I learned all of this from a youtube video since I’ve never made a knife before. (There was no tempering or metallurgy involved just cutting, grinding and sanding)

I’ve not finished them yet, but I thought I’d share a picture of them. Honestly, the knives are not very pretty but it was interesting to make something from an old recycled edger blade. It was probably crazy to pick the edger blade up in the first place, but I had some fun making the knives and I learned a lot along the way.

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Very nice work! Thank you for sharing!

I made a larger-pen-keeper version. It is in the leather-n-lasers folder on the member drive.

Help yourself to use and/or modify.

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Thanks Mike. I appreciate the file, too. I’d like to be able to use one of the many slimline pens I’ve made with the notebook.

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Catching up on some more things I made during the month of January! :smiley:


**January 13th:**

Playing about with some more dye sublimation. This time I was trying to sublimate images onto two sided aluminum square keychains. I used the recommended settings according to the manufacturer’s site. It turns out those settings don’t work so well on our heat press. Next time I will try different settings. Overall, it was a good learning experience (if nothing else, I learned to not try to test settings with several blanks at once! hahaha…):

Front:

Back:

With Key Rings:



January 22nd:

While setting up our (new to us) Roland Metaza MPX-80 Metal Engraver, I continued through the user’s manual through how to engrave a photo. I used (both sides) of a stainless steel dog tag to run through the first test runs. The first time I engraved the image, there was hardly any detail on our clothes, so I flipped the dog tag over again, adjusted the settings a bit and tried again. The photos you see below are from the second pass. You will notice that the clothes show up fine; but, we have lost the details in our faces ~ OhMy! hehe… I learned a valuable lesson. Make sure the image used has good lighting/coloring to begin with - otherwise it’s an uphill battle to get it to even out to engrave! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2nd Attempt:

2nd Attempt:

2nd Attempt:

(See below for a pics showing the other side of the dog tag - where the details on the clothes were blown out…)



January 23rd:

A few hours later… I found someone to help me get the heat press out, then I used the same photo that I had used to engrave with to do a comparison on a dye sublimatable dog tag. I also tested a pink bag and a fluffy white microfiber cloth that I bought from Dollar Tree to see if I could use them for dye sublimation projects. The dye sub dog tag and the pink bag from Dollar Tree both worked GREAT; and, the fluffy white microfiber cloth worked MUCH better than I expected ~ w00t! :smiley:

Comparison of Family photo engraved on dog tag vs sublimated on dog tag:

All The Things (that I did that night…):



January 26th:

Back to the Metaza… This time calibrating the machine. I used one of the copper test squares to test/calibrate the pins. It took a couple of passes; but, I finally got the test file to be pretty consistent. Then I used an image that was set-up to show the capabilities of the engraver to test the results of the calibration.

Copper Test Material (this stuff is expensive, so please do not use any of the copper squares to for personal projects):

Test Image - shows what the engraver is capable of!



January 28th:

Getting ready to start teaching classes on the Metaza - testing the center vise on pens from Dollar Tree…

Plastic Pen for Talan - still in the center vise:

Plastic Pen for Talan:

Plastic Pen for Evan:

Aluminum (or some other soft metal?) Stylus/Pen for Evan:

Aluminum (or some other soft metal?) Stylus/Pen for Talan:



January 30th:

One more quick round of center vise testing on the Metaza. This time with stainless steel pens from Walmart. I used the default settings for stainless steel. It looks like the pressure needs to be cranked up a touch. The Metaza is just like many other things we have at the 'Space, in that it’s always good to have extra material to do a test run to confirm the settings will have the effect that you are looking for! :wink: :smiley:

1st stainless steel pen for me - still in vise:

2nd stainless steel pen for me:



I had a lot of fun learning how to make things that I never would have even thought about trying if I hadn’t been a member of Dallas Makerspace! :heart_eyes:

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Enameling Pendants Workshop in Jewelry/Small Metals-

Here are some pictures from an Enameling Workshop we had last Monday night ;). We had so much fun and are happy to get Enameling going at the Space!!

Cheers,
Katiri

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One of our members with her piece she designed, cut out and enameled :slight_smile:

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That looks so good!!!

Proving yet again that there is no such thing as too many clamps. :slight_smile:
Beautiful.

Loading pieces into the kiln to be enameled :slight_smile:

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One of our members with a piece she designed, cut out by hand and enameled into an Art Deco Pendant :slight_smile:

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Fired enamel pieces made by one of our members to be made into earrings :slight_smile:

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Latest blog entry’s up.
Great January!
Thank you!

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