Thoughtophone

I brought these home today. Here's a couple of photos: I'm photographing it in the living room, because my shed is filled with boxes, as I'm re-doing the shelving to be more flexible, and lining the walls at the same time. It might be a while before I actually use this! The first picture is the really illustrative one. Just look how solid it is! The movement in all the axis is very smooth. It comes with all the parts greased with something odourless, clear and colourless. I think I'll have to find out what it is. There are a few promising details: The head can rotate, but to zero it, you can lower it down onto the table: the bottom is flat. If you do that, you'll find the zero marker is perfect anyway. I think the fence seems pretty good: certainly it's a quick way to work with wood, and it certainly looks like you could use this as an inverted router table for small work. Perhaps you could even slide something larger along the fence, with the guard se

In the end, I chose this combination. It might have been more interesting to have tried the Wabeco, but at this point I'd really like something that works. I was also heavily influenced by all the CNC conversions I've seen for this set up. I hadn't considered using this for PCB milling, but that's definitely a possibility. I found Foxcot  sell these two for £303 delivered. I decided the fact I had never heard of them would be OK since I could pay by Paypal. In the basket they quoted in Pounds, but then passed a price in Euros to Paypal, who's conversion was higher, so I didn't pay. Then I went back to the order status page, and followed the link to complete, which this time submitted the amount in pounds to Paypal. I don't know who made that mistake, but I saved £10. Otherwise I'd have use Conrad Electronic instead. It arrived via UPS, who failed to deliver at the first attempt, because 'No apartment number provided', but the company name was

Calliper Abuse for Beginners explains how useful callipers are for marking, while the MIT video explains there inaccuracy. These  Scriber Vernier Callipers  seem like a good solution, but are rather pricey. I'd much rather have a digital set, but I guess I could use digital callipers to set them.

I've trying to choose between these two, so I thought I'd make some notes: Proxxon Wabeco Total cost £320.00 £254.00 Column thickness 45 35 Stand Weight 7 13.5 Table weight 4.9 5.7 Width 200 400 Depth 200 180 Height 500 500 Z Travel 65 250 X Travel 150 320 Y Travel 150 100 T-Slot size 10 10 Fine feed yes no The Wabeco stand is heavier, and this is generally a good sign. The set up is also cheaper, and includes a step clamp set. The prices include shipping. The Wabeco stand has an integral Y-Axis, which makes it more flexible. E.g. it could be used with a router, which would tend to be too wide to fit in the Proxxon. The Proxxon components are widely used and reviewed: they are a known quantity. The column thickness, which should be the most important statistic when it comes to accuracy, is significantly greater. It can definitely be converted to CNC.  It's smaller size means it fits better in my work space. It has a Z axis fine feed. Some routers would fi

I discovered these videos , which are an excellent overview if the machine shop, and specifically a machine shop for robotics prototyping. Of course, they have several large expensive machines you simply can't replicate in a home workshop. I've only watched the first one. The second half of that video explains a method for drilling holes very accurately in metal. The basics describe how to mark the work piece, and the accuracy you can expect to get with a few different methods. The accuracy is actually very high - to the extent that the best marking by hand practices can be ignored as a source of errors: drilling is an order of magnitude less accurate even on MITs marvellous drilling machine. Some of the techniques I've already used: using centring drill bits, but I don't have a compound table or centre finder to use the suggested technique. Before I watched that, I bought a machine vice from Warco. It actually seems like a nice piece of equipment: The action is very

The long and short are celebrating Larry Tesler , who is, in effect, the inventor of the copy and paste error. If you think I'm being harsh, and this is just the law of unforeseen consequences at work, remember he was a programmer, and probably proceeded to use this 'feature' in his work. I remember using Rational Ada as part of my CS course, back in 1992. I've only recently started using something that resembles a structured editor, with 'refactor' again. In the meantime, it's been cut and paste all the way. I won't, however, be looking back. Goodbye cut and paste, and good riddance. Now there's copy and paste journalism. But that certainly is an unforeseen consequence.

I've recently discovered toggle clamps. You can buy small ones for a fiver, either on ebay, or a spectacular array of clamps are available from Good Hand UK Limited . I haven't bought anything from the latter, I should add though. I bought 4 very cheap ones on ebay, intending to do something better than my previous hold down clamps. I started by attacking one to some aluminium channel. The idea being that it would work like a hold down clamp: hold the back up, the middle down, and press down at the end. I thought the screw holes were M5, found they were M4, and then used M3 screws with a washer. The result was a bit of a bodge. Also, I should have spaced everything out a bit more, but there isn't really room for the result on the drill press. So I re-purposed it to clamp work in place on the circular saw Jig: It's quite primitive: You have to replace the screw with a longer one to clamp thicker work, but for repetitive cuts it's very convenient.