(Drill) Pressing Matters

< POST WRITTEN LAST YEAR>

Hello again,

It's been a while since I last posted some thing and you may be forgiven wondering what I have been doing. Well I have acquired a piller drill:

The Beast, Less Blurry IRL

The keen eyed will have noticed:

• It's a bit rusty
• It has what looks to be a big yellow warning sign hanging of the back of it
• There are bare wires hanging out the side of it!

The story behind this particular drill is that it suffered a switch failure and the company who owned it decided that it just wasn't worth fixing.  It then came to private hands who had meant to fix it but had been stopped by circumstances. Since then It has been in an damp workshop waiting for its time to come.

1st job a quick bit of sanding to remove the surface rust and a coat of light oil. The surface came up pretty nice with very little effort and the coat of oil and a new warmer home should help prevent rust reforming

Next a new plate and replacement of the switch. I decided to go with a high current toggle switch on the drill and an emergency stop switch on the table. Reasoning behind this is that altho strictly speaking you should clamp everything that is being drilled in a drill presses down, no one ever does. So I wanted an E.M. stop I could work without needing my hands, as one may be holding the work and one operating the feed.

I didn't feel that a no volt cutout switch (after a power cut they need to be cycled to before working again I.E. if the power goes out the drill wont restart when the power comes back on line.) Would be necessary as this is only going to light duty domestic use, chances of me using it during a power cut AND forgetting to turn it off are pretty slim.

Hole Enlargement... 

As my step drills were not available (due to me being a fool of the highest caliber) the Job of reaming out the hole in the new aluminium switch plate fell to a large screwdriver, this was surprisingly effective if hard slow work.

The finished article

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, It's obviously not standard yet still looks smart enough, the screw next to the the switch acts as an earth connection to the plate.

Next thing I needed was table I had a load of 1" chipboard left over from my

</POST WRITTEN LAST YEAR>

Kitchen table kludge and that very weekend I killed my faux workmate by shearing one of its handles of while tightening it (whoops).  So I used the frame of that, having stripped out the handels and leadscrews,  with the chip board and some 2x2.

The Finished Drill

As you can see the drill itself sits on an extra pice of chipboard and the chipboard top rides on some 2x2" this is more about raising the drill up than adding strength (tho it does that too) between the drills chipboard foot and the table is a thin pice of rubber this (along with all the dense yet soft wood) is there to help damp out the vibration form the drill. While it does produce a low rumble in the floor its very quiet and as I only use it at sensible times of day it's really not a problem at all. The whole lot is held together with coach bolts.

All in all it works very well (altho it has got rather buried, been having a bit of a sort out). The hip level EM stop works well when you have both hands full.  All in all well worth the repair.

This was the only half post I had and is probably a bit of a cop-out but i have spent some time taking photos for a blog post when i'm away next weekend. heres to the posts continuing.

Steampunk Goggles and Hat

NIZE HAT!

For a Prof Elemental gig I quickly knocked up a pair of goggle and hat. 

The hat is an ex-wedding rental hat I brought cheap one evening while still a student (passing shop an...ZOMGHAT!!!). I replaced the grey hat band with a brown snakeskin belt from a charity shop and stitched some EL wire on to it. This is my first time working with EL (I had been looking for any excuse to play with it ) and I was pleasantly surprised by how thin and easy to bend it is (don't know why it was thicker in my minds eye). It's attached to the hat with fishing line (Taking the recommendation of Daniel Luke O'malley who used black thread). Fishing line is surprisingly easy to sew with altho you do need a needle with a big enough eye. This wasn't my first time sewing with fishing line having sewn caving over suits back together with it before. To get though the hat I ended up using a leather needle (triangular in section at the tip) form one of those cheap "many odd needles" packs you get in supermarkets. This was fairly easy altho I did have to reach for the pliers when I got to the brim. This did leave some fairly big marks in the hat mind, not one for a had worth actual money. The inverter is stashed in a little leather pouch that sits on the brim.

Some pretty rough sewing there.

The goggles were sections of bog roll tube cut according to this tutorial to give the eye cups. The key bit is that paper template shape with the sinusoidal peak in the middle. They then have a cut down deodorant cap inserted for extra strength (turns out the brand I use happened to be a good fit for the bog roll I use) before being faced with steel mesh (frying anti-spatter screen) and wrapped in leather from a £1 charity shop handbag (A long haired and  be-bearded gent like me shopping for handbags got some odd looks  i can tell you!) The silver rings/bezels were from the same handbag and used to attach the handels. The whole thing is held together with hot glue. The strap and nose bridge are made from £1 charity shop belt held on with yet more of the hot goo. Unfortunately the curve of the nose bridge means the hot glue want's to peel away from the nose band (as can be seen in the top picture). I should have riveted them together (even thought about it, couldn't find my riveter at the time) hindsight is a wonderful thing.

All in all, given the amount of time I spent on this I'm really please with how it came out. 

A LONG YEAR OF SHAME

Errr....well its been over a year since my last post, and the post before that was an apology for not blogging...  all it needs is one of these:

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

And this blog could be declared legally dead.

But I'm going to try to breath some life back into this thing. To start with I want say why I want to blog:

I've been tinkering with stuff for ever off and on and a MAJOR part of the things I have done has been guidance from the internet. Seriously form using wikipedia to get a back round in something to specific project walk thoughs and tutorials it has been probably my biggest single resource.  Not to mention the hours of just interested browsing of off cool stuff.  Then a while ago I discovered the blog of Charles Guan (e^i(pi)) which has to be one of my favourite reads! (seriously go check out his work). On his About Me  page Charles says:

"As I continued posting content to the site, I began realizing that very few engineers or hobbyists document what they do extensively, especially in a public arena such as the Internet. I found this problematic and somewhat disappointing, since undoubtedly there was alot of redundant work being done retracing the mistakes of other people – something which could be easily avoided if discoveries and solutions were well-documented. Therefore, whenever I run upon something I find curious or interesting, I pitch it on this site." 

The bit about redundant work struck a cord as did the experiences I have had of seeing amazing project on line (say a couple of stills or a youtube video) yet not being able to find any other information on how the thing is built and what makes it go. So with the best laid intentions off I went...

To write 5 blog posts, sigh... thing is I want to write well and be helpful like the best blogs that I consume are but... I really find it hard, I'm dyslexic and while it certainly doesn't stop me (I frequently write large reports during my day job for example) I would never describe the process of writing as "pleasurable", and it slows me down, with writing and spell checking It was taking 3-4 hours on a decent length post to get it to a quality I liked, 3-4 precious hours I could spend actually making things. and so as it was such a large amount of time and not altogether pleasurable it got put off and put off and... well you know.

So now I have come to conclusion I will take an hour a week to blog (regardless of what is happening) and then 10 minutes to clean it up and then post it, I'm hoping this brevity will help me get something up and that it still contains the useful stuff that I want to put up.

Here's hoping...only time will tell if i keep it up

Also I'm not counting this blog post there'll be another post up this weekend.




*digging man gif  taken form user/torwuf 's mirror of of the XKCD geocities tribute:
forum post XCKD Geocities mirror