Show and Tell June 2020

Update: as of June 15, 2020 @ Noon, we are OPEN (with caveats), so please amend the below to include anything made AT DMS, too!

Please show off anything made OUTSIDE DMS, since we’re CLOSED owing to COVID-19

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 or other social media (with attribution to each maker of course).


:bulb: NOTE: Please try to include the following on each post, to help make for richer social media 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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From May Show & Tell

This is gorgeous!! I’m drooling buckets!! Please tell us more about how you made it …

I ordered both the ring cores and crushed opal from https://www.theopaldealer.com/

It’s best to wait until they have a good sale, which they’ll run 30-40% off.

Had guidance/assistance from @lordrook , but essentially applied the crushed opal with CA glue in the ring. Kept a small bowl underneath to capture any of the fallen bits and then crushed those into finer pieces/nearly powder to try to fill in the gaps. From there just lots of sanding until flush with the ring core (I believe I started with 120?), then slowly sanding with finer grit while moving along and finished with polishing paste.

While sanding, some pieces flaked off or discovered “gaps” that I didn’t see before. So filled in the gaps with CA glue and then just went back to sanding once dry enough.

Doing it over again I think I may try to do it a bit differently. I still have about 3 more of these to make, 1 more for me, 2 for friends.

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What opal “particle size” did you use? Right this minute they are having a 30% off sale, for another day or so.

Almost positive it was the medium size.

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Well I’m finally shipping off this massive table I’ve been working on. Let me tell you without the Multicam CNC this project became so much tougher. The table is 10.5 feet long, 4 feet wide, 2 inches thick. It’s being shipped to NJ for a client. I used Rubio Monocoat Charcoal finish to darken the walnut, epoxy is flowcast from Ecopoxy, used 45 liters, yes, 45 liters! The hours spent with my #7 hand plane…

Epoxy was poured in my dining room, made the form out of plywood covered in tyvek tape, silicon in all cracks. It was nerve wracking pouring that much epoxy indoors.

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Floor tiles that I 3D printed from designs downloaded from Thingiverse. The designer is releasing 30 designs over 30 days for free, and then taking them all down on day 31. Currently on day 26. Check them out at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4354208

EDIT: This is four 1" square tiles. They clip together with the OpenLOCK system.

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That’s kinda interesting.

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I’ve done a few like that as well, and @AlexRhodes has printed miles worth of filament in those type of things.

He uses the circular ball magnets with a base and you glue the top on to get some nice magnet magic.

Be careful and don’t get addicted like Alex…

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picked up a 1983 powermatic 66 for $150 (!) and have been slowly stripping it down, cleaning it up and restoring it.


So close to reassembly! I’ve replaced the arbor bearings, cleaned, wire-wheeled, primed and painted everything, repaired a few sliding surfaces, got the arbor lift pin un-stuck… that was fun. Next on the list is figuring out what to do about a fence, dust collection and casters, as well as a possible attached router table and outfeed wings.

Really loving what this guy did for a DIY Biesemeyer-style fence: https://youtu.be/4pudkvHFOfk

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I’m probably gonna try to fix a skate board on Monday, maybe make a Video.

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Printed another SD/Micro sd card holder. No cleanup has been done yet.

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Wow! That is amazing.

Hi Boys and Girls,

This is my first post, so please be gentle.

I have just completed the Texas Tornado prototype. It is a bowl created from thin strips of wood laminated with plywood into a block, sliced into thin sheets, cut into rings, laminated onto a solid base, and topped with a segmented rim. I just barely completed some critical DMS steps one day before the shutdown (routed jigs on the CNC and cut the block into sheets).

Here are some progress pics:

The lamination block consists of 35 pieces of 1/4-3/16" thin 2" X 12-5/8" whitewood & western red cedar sandwiched with 3/4 plywood. The finished block is 2" X 12-5/8" X 12-5/8"

I cut the block into (6) 1/8’ thick slices and drilled holes to prep for cutting them into rings. I cut the rings using a circle cutting jig mounted on my scroll saw. The inside diameter of one ring becomes the outside diameter of the next ring::

I cut all the rings and stacked them. By twisting each ring, they form a tornado pattern.

I mounted a sacrificial piece of maple onto my lathe chuck and glued the base onto it with four sheets brown paper/titebond 3. The chuck weighs about 5 lbs., so I added a couple of 4 lbs weights instead of trying to clamp them. Here I’ve also glued the first four rings and rough turned the outside:

Here I’ve glued and rough turned up to ring 7. You can see the plywood is perilously chippy:

As the rings got bigger, I thought I needed more evenly distributed weight, so I added this monster of a 3 HP router and put the weights on the outside of the router table insert:

As the rings got larger, I used the disc sander mounted on the tail stock of my shopsmith to keep it flat, then after I glued all 40 rings I added a 12-segment rim made of western red cedar. If your unfamiliar with WRC, it is the cheap lumber commonly used for fence planks. I have an abundance of it left over from Intarsia projects:

I managed to get the outside rim roughed, but it didn’t take much of a catch on the inside rim to part the bowl between the base and ring 1. Fortunately, lathe projects turning at 1000 rpm or less, tend to fall downward instead of spinning airborne, so this bad boy took a couple of bounces across the garage floor after escaping the tool rest. Well, it is just a prototype, so WTF, over? It was a clean break, the cracks in the bowl were pretty limited, and the top rim split right at a couple of joints.

Some glue, a band clamp and lots of sanding and I managed to get it back on track. Here it is sanded and shaped, then I built a cardboard spray booth and applied multiple coats of Deft gloss lacquer.

After the Deft finish cured for five days, I rubbed it with micro-mesh pads and buffed it with polish. So here it is: 12" diameter, 6-3/4" tall, 3/8" wall thickness, weighing in at 1lb-4oz:

I move that this category hereby be renamed “show and tell all”

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Any chance you have an ancient ancestor named “Job”?
What patience that took! Great result.

Love, love, love that segmented turning! Beautiful!

EDIT: Your concise description makes it sound simple. This is a time lapse summary where a hundred(+) hours of work is condensed into a few paragraphs. Again - Bravo! Well done!

Beautiful - thanks for details on the process.

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Thanks Bert! I dunno about patience and Job, but I am a damn slow woodworker. I did manage to drill all the holes for the circle cutting jig on the CNC without burning the place down, so there’s that (and thanks again for the advice).

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Thanks Chris,

yeah, and you got the condensed version. The idea of prototyping is to validate processes and identify potential issues. In that sense alone, the prototype was tremendously successful, as umm, I found uncovered lots of issues.

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