Machining
I have a Sherline milling machine and lathe that I use to make various fun things. I converted the mill to CNC using the standard Sherline stepper motor mounts and a Xylotex 3-axis kit. I drive the whole thing from an IBM T42 thinkpad running Ubuntu and EMC2. The hardest part about CNC is generating the G-code. If you don’t have a ton of money to drop on a CAD/CAM tool suite you are stuck writing G-code by hand. I write Python script to generate G-code for me, but it’s still more painful than it should be.
Servo Mount
This was a mount that held two servo motors to the chassis of a robot. The robot ended up weighing too much so I had to remove the heavier pieces which included this mount. I had to replace it with double sided sticky tape. The aluminum was a much nicer solution. This was machined by hand before I converted my mill to CNC.
Rotor mounts
These were my attempts at machining mounting hardware for helicopter style rotors.
Integrating Sphere
I was doing some work making a color matching device and was experimenting with integrating spheres. This is a wax version I machined and coated with Titanium white acrylic paint. I used neodymium magnets to hold the two parts together. The magnets are placed so that the two halves are “keyed” and will only fit one way. They are super strong magnets and when I wasn’t careful the two sides would snap together and the wax started showing some cracks because of it.
This was an early test to see how well a half sphere would machine.
Here are two more wax machining experiments.
Plastic lens
This was a test lens/light-pipe for a colorimeter. It was machined on my lathe. It has a 45 degree taper.
Rugged Case
This was a very rugged case I machined out of Delrin to house the colorimeter electronics for the very first prototype. I had to build this very quickly for a demo, so it’s a no-frills box.
