Ever wonder how wood spheres are made? Normally they are made on a wood lathe with some fancy jigs and fixtures. [Izzy Swan] set out to bring wood sphere manufacturing to the masses by designing an inexpensive machine that uses a standard circular saw to carve a block of wood into a sphere.
Here’s how it works: a piece of wood is held in a wood fixture and spun using a hand drill. The fixture and drill are mounted to a wooden ring that rotates about a perpendicular axis. The user manually moves the entire assembly back and forth about that second axis while spinning the drill. Meanwhile, a circular saw is moved closer and closer to the soon-to-be-sphere, nibbling away little by little. After most of the material has been cut from the block of wood, it is removed from the fixture and spun 90 degrees to cut the two remaining nubs. The end result is a pretty nice looking sphere.
There isn’t much to this machine’s make up except stuff the average DIYer has kicking around the shop. If you’d like to make a wooden sphere but don’t have a circular saw or desire to lose a finger, no prob, check out this method that uses an orbital sander.
The first 2 minutes of this video is a waste.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94nv12L5_4#t=125
Apparently HAD doesn’t properly handle youtube videos linking to a specific time.
Applying the Wadsworth constant works nicely too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y94nv12L5_4&wadsworth=1
Love it. I’m sharing this with the makerspace guys in my area. Who needs a 5-axis CNC when a little elbow grease will do it? lol – please don’t flame me, I’m being slightly sarcastic.
This is hazardous, I’d rather smoke some weed.
Why not both? (Asks the 8 fingered carpenter.)
Why not Zoidberg? (Asks the idiot surgeon.)
Yeah, if you’re going to mess yourself up you might as well feel good about it at least.
There’s a bunch of YouTube videos on this subject. Most of them involve using a jig and a table saw which is probably (marginally) safer than just using some circular saw setup.
I would expect a sander or grinder to be used in this setup, it’s quite odd to pick a circular saw seeing the sideway force and all – and the danger of the blade.
Mind you if you used a grinder it would also pose danger and you’d have issues with the wood burning,, but you could use one with adjustable speed to fix that I tend to think.
Cool, but doesn’t it put a lot of pressure on the saw blade, wouldn’t want that sucker exploding!
Hope he likes the nickname “Lefty”, all of his power tools have the safety features stripped off.
Hey, at least he was wearing a respirator!
If you do not stick your fingers, or other body parts into spinning blades then you should stay fairly safe. Or you can go watch TV and leave using power tools to those of us who can handle it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read today – if you think your reflexes can save your fingers/hand/arm from a kickback, you’re either stupid or delusional.
Yes I think my motor skills will keep me from having any accidents in the first place. So far my 50 years on this planet are proof that I’m right too.
Proof that you’re lucky.
Multiple, redundant safety features are the only way to keep you from having any accidents in the first place. Motor skills are not enough.
Everytime i hear of a woodworker accident, it’s always older people that has bad habits like you. You are too confident. I may have half your age but I’ve learned to trade some confidence for respect, specially knowing so much people without all of their ten fingers. I hope you don’t take this as offensive and realize that it’s not about self-confidence.
Ego issues? Eventually everyone makes a mistake. All it takes is one.
It is okay. You are not less of a man if you accept your own physical limits. Oh, and isn’t it about time you backed up your files too?
Sources of harm, electrical, mechanical, thermal, radiant etc.. to the human body can be avoided with three main prevention strategies 1) persuasion/education, 2) legal obligations (laws/standards), or 3) automatic mechanisms, such as machine guarding.
Unsurprisingly, 3) is the most effective.
I presume that you removed your unnecessary airbags, seatbelts, home ground fault interrupter, earth stake, hot water tempering valve and furnace flame out arrestor?
…right up until the blade fractures and half of it flies off in a random direction at high speed… there’s a lot of energy in these rotary tools when they are powered up.
When exactly has that ever happened to you? What kind of cheap off brand blades are you using anyways? I use cheap off brand blades sometimes myself and I’ve still never had it happen to me, or even ever heard about it happening to anyone else for that matter. I got 2 table saws, a radial arm saw, and a half a dozen circular saws too. So if it happened with fair frequency I certainly have plenty of opportunity for it to happen here for me.
The pussies on this site never cease to entertain me I swear!
So it is an ego thing.
Remember that if you screw up, it is your family that will pay the price by having to take care of you.
It’s one thing to bravely confront risk to life and limb yourself and thumb your nose at gub-ern-mint safety regulations while at home, but the safety bar should be set higher if something like this is being set up in a hackerspace or public place where anyone, including someone’s kids, could potentially walk up to it and use it.
It should also be pointed out that even in the absence of blade failure, tungsten carbide tips can come off or fracture.
@pcf11: By your statement–that it never happend to you–I should, then, think that it would impossible for me or anyone to make a millon dollars, since I’ve never made a million dollars.
Furthurmore, just because you use a tool does not make you an expert on said tool–regardless of how many years you’ve used it.
skittish
Proving your culture isn’t a boys club, one title at a time.
Well, etsy doesn’t exactly make males comfortable either. [shrug]
Izzy does some pretty cool stuff. You guys should check out his channel. He recently made an impressive Etch-a-sketch router.
I think HAD should just stop posting anything with a saw in it. Every single saw hack I’ve seen on here is so insanely dangerous… And this is coming from someone who does some pretty dangerous hacks.
killjoy.
If nothing else, articles like this show you “how not to do it.”
Isn’t that why we call them ‘Hacks’ ?
I really wish I could award “skulls” to some comments….
You could at least have corrected the aspect ration of the screenshot.
At the right circumstances (or wrong), this may eventually cut your balls.
If everyone is concerned about educating the masses, how about citing specific examples of what he did unsafely; why it’s unsafe; how it could wrong; and perhaps provide suggestions on how to do it correctly, without using the “buy a mill” cop out. Without specific critiques, it will be tough for the inexperienced person to tell what parts were unsafe, i.e. surely everything he did wasn’t worthless to them…if the goal is to educate of course.
When shit goes wrong, it goes wrong fast.
Knowing where to stand when it inevitably all goes pear-shaped helps a lot.
LOL and here we were thinking the “safety police trolls” were bad on YouTube…
Good thing it’s wooden balls. For a moment I thought of metal or plastic balls and got concerned. Thanks HaD.
there’s always horrible freight
http://www.harborfreight.com/catalogsearch/result?q=wood+lathe
or grizzling
http://www.grizzly.com/products/category/565000
tho with HAD’s normal slant, I’d expected some aluminum extrusions, an arduino, stepper motors and a 40 watt laser
Wait, there’s something wrong with Grizzly?
I think something like this is best left to a woordworking lathe, and the “jig” would move a
chisel tip against the spinning dowel–rather than moving the spinning dowel against a
circular saw.
Using a woodworking lathe, is/should be the defacto standard when you need to carve some
special pattern in wood while it spins. (eg when carving a decorative lamp/table leg, or balls)
Moreover, if you wanted to use Rich Bremer’s design (as is) — you could replace the circular saw with an appropriate woodworking lathe chisel–which would negate some, if not all of, the safety issues of high rpm saw blades.
Granted the design/mechanics would need to altered slightly to accomodate the chisel…but it should be a safer alternative.