Making the Man Candle

So...  we saw this on the interwebs and thought it was an awesome idea.  This is a manly candle, full of bacon flavor and odouriferousness.  It's also a good recycling project as the only thing extra we bought was the wick.

Starting with a jar of saved bacon grease, a wick, and a drill....

Use the drill to make a hole in the middle of the grease.  This is a bit messy.

Then install the wick.  It took some trial and error to get the wick to stay in place.

Then just light and enjoy the wonderful smell of bacon, without actually having to cook anything!

USB Building Blocks

Minion found an awesome and simple project on the interwebs for replacing the case of a USB thumb drive with one made from LEGO blocks.  The people on the interwebs used an X-ACTO knife, but we have CNC machines at our disposal and decided to use those instead.

 We started with an unassuming LEGO block.  Minion liked this red one.

Minion took some basic measurements, and I used Dolphin PartMaster to generate some code to mill out the bottom and add an opening for the USB connector.  I also thinned the walls of the block down to about 0.030 to make the thumb drive guts fit more easily.

We also made a bottom plate to cover things up, and had to remove two of the nubs to make room for the USB connector.  Because we thinned the walls of the lego block, we will have to glue this on.

Only a little trimming with the X-Acto knife was required.  Here are the pieces and tools ready for assembly.

A Sandisk 4GB thumb drive...

 placed inside a lego block...

with the bottom plate glued on...

== awesomeness.  We'll see if we can't get some pictures of the CNC machining next time when we make a blue one.

Brunch

Looks like breakfast... but it's lunchtime!

Then lunch showed up from the grill...

bottom bun + burger + cheese + bacon + ketchup + egg + top bun

== delicious!

Making tools to make tools for my machine tools.

I bought an independently adjustable 4-jaw chuck for my lathe.  The chuck came with an adapter plate, but my lathe (Emco Compact 5 CNC) is a bit special and didn't fit the adapter plate.  The bolt holes for my lathe were half in the center hole on the adapter plate. The solution?  Another adapter plate, of course!

This adapter plate is made from some 2" aluminum round stock.  It moves the bolt holes out in diameter just enough that they will hit the stock adapter plate that came with the chuck.  When I went to machine the outer diameter, I discovered that my carriage doesn't go that close to the headstock.  My toolchanger takes boring bars, but they all have the cutting edge on the wrong side.  The solution, of course, is a custom tool!

I ground some drill rod to make a cutting edge, then heated it with a blowtorch and quenched it in water.  Considering I'd never done any of those things before, it went very well.  The tool is shown in the above picture ready to take its first cut.  I should have ground the heel a bit more, but it did cut and I was able to cut the outer diameter properly.

The stock adapter plate also needed some modification.  Remember how I said the bolt holes for the Emco headstock were  half in the center hole of the stock adapter plate?  Well, I need access to those bolts to tighten the whole thing to the lathe.  The stock plate is cast iron, which I'd never machined before.  I read up on it a bit, got out my boring bar (first time using this tool too!), and slowly cut openings in this adapter to allow access to the bolts on my adapter.  I didn't use a boring head, as the diameter from the boring bar itself was exactly what I wanted.

Then I needed to drill and tap the other 4 holes for bolts that would hold the stock adapter to my adapter.  I figured the best way to get the drilling lined up with my adapter would be to use a transfer punch... but I don't have any... so I built one!

I took some more drill rod, turned it down to just under the diameter of my bolt holes, and left a sharp pip on the end.  After heating this up and quenching it, I had a brand new transfer punch!

This, of course, was immediately used to locate the drilling spots on the stock adapter plate that would be used to attach it to my adapter plate.

If you look closely in the next pic, you can see the center punch marks in the cast iron.  They are in between the channels I bored out earlier.

I then drilled and tapped the holes.  Cast iron is really easy to machine, although you have to spend some time cleaning all of the gritty powder off your machine and tools when you are done.

Success!  These two adapter plates stay bolted together and essentially make one adapter.  When I want to change to the new chuck, I just bolt these adapters to the lathe and then bolt the chuck on.

Flytrap

This past weekend I bought a Venus Flytrap. It may be outside the range of technology or building, but I began this out of intrigue so it gets shared on the blog. Besides, I shared the cray fish (RIP Clamps.) I have no idea how to care for it or what to feed it, but I think it will be pretty cool to try and make it grow. I have had good luck with awesome plants in the past, specifically my Banana plant (dwarf cavendish) that is about 4'-5' tall, and hope that this works out similarly.
This is a picture of it. Earlier today we picked a spider off the ceiling and dropped it in. With a little nudging... Snap! 4 hours later the trap is closed extra tight. A little research has told me that the pod will actually hermetically seal and then becomes a little stomach, digesting the food and extracting the nutrients. Stay tuned for video of an attack in the future.

Packet Abounds

We are working with a primitive 1200 baud RF data technology called packet. What is cool is that it would work even if the Internet was down. We'll be rounding this out over the coming weeks. If you are impatient lookup "ARISSat"

Here's a link:
http://www.arissat1.org/v3/

Milling Circuit Boards

I purchased a Proxxon high-speed (20K RPM!) spindle for milling circuit boards.  After devising a way to attach the spindle to my milling machine, I used eagle (and the pcb-gcode script) to generate the G-code for the following simple board.  This board contains a microcontroller (the 8-lead device in the center), an 0805 resistor, and several pads to attach wires.

After running the g-code on the milling machine, I ended up with the following circuit board.

Then I installed some components and attached wires for power.  The micro is programmed using the 4 surface mount pads between the micro and the wires.  I wrote a program to blink out "HI" in Morse code on the LED.