Do you want to make your own springs? Yeah, that’s what we thought. Well, blow the dust off of that spare Arduino and keep reading. A few months ago, we let you know that renowned circuit sculptor [Jiří Praus] was working on a precision wire-bending machine to help him hone his craft. Now it’s real, it’s spectacular, and it’s completely open source.
Along with that ‘duino you’ll need a CNC shield and a couple of NEMA 17 steppers — one to feed the wire and one to help bend it. Before being bent or coiled into springs, the wire must be super straight, so the wire coming off the spool holder runs through two sets of rollers before being fed into the bender.
[Jiří]’s main goal for this build was precision, which we can totally get behind. If you’re going to build a machine to do something for you, ideally, it should also do a better job than you alone. It’s his secondary goal that makes this build so extraordinary. [Jiří] wanted it to be easy to build with commonly-available hardware and a 3D printer. Every part is designed to be printed without supports. Bounce past the break to watch the build video.
You can also make your own springs on a lathe, or print them with hacked g-code.
I have to wonder if the “Probably Won’t Kill All Humans” part of the title is a reference to Universal Paperclips
More likely the character Bender from Futurama.
https://66.media.tumblr.com/e48e5fdcc604448ced56092d7d3fe14f/tumblr_p4yfvqxjuX1v6ztu8o6_500.gif
If that machineran on a 6502 like Bender and the Terminator it would produce mortal coils….
I think it is a reference to the killer run-amok robotic/AI “Paperclip Maximizer”
Bending wires to make things using a robot has a fair portion of its attributes. :-)
https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximizer-3ed4cccc669a
Then there’s this: Isaac Arthur is a good mind to listen to about sci-fi stuff and science/technology subjects in general. Great to listen to while enjoying a meal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mk7NVFz_88
Oh you just had to, didn’t you! That’s the rest of next week down the drain (again)
(p.s. Mods – sorry – I clicked on “Report Comment” to the parent by mistake – soz)
I think it is a reference to the killer run-amok robotic/AI “Paperclip Maximizer”
Bending wires to make things using a robot has a fair portion of its attributes. :-)
https://hackernoon.com/the-parable-of-the-paperclip-maximizer-3ed4cccc669a
All that effort to make a spiral? I assume he has further plans for it or I feel this could’ve been greatly simplified.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if these comments are jokes or not…
This is a machine that can automatically make custom springs of arbitrary diameter and length. If you can’t understand why something like this might be useful if you need, say if you need 100 identical springs of a particular size, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I think even for 1x in quantity it would be useful. From my understanding if you want to make your own you will typicaly wrap it around a core (typicaly a screw) to have both the wire height spacing and inner diameter, so that mean you have to have a least a couple of screw with different diameter.
For sure x100 that would be awsome to have such thing!
Can somebody send me a link for what the purpose of the 2x set of bearings? I guess the first one could be to flat it out a little bit, when looking at other wire bender maching the 2nd set seem to contains less bearings.
for example a multi-band normal-mode helical antenna would be a nice application for this…I assure you, it’s a major pain in the butt to do by hand.
Is it typical that the “building” centers around the easy part of using nuts and bolts putting it together, leaving out the crucial but difficult part of making the bending plate from steel?
nice do you think this can work for flat wire coil type springs?
I am impressed. The commercial spring making machines I have seen feed the wire against a fixed piece to form the bend. This build uses a moving bender. I’m guessing that this is done because the machine may make more varied bends than are possible with a fixed piece.
Today I learned that even modern countries still use medieval measurements for wood screws.
It’s definitely a reference to Bender from Futurama. He’s a _bender_ for crying out loud.
Notice how there is room for two posts? It can bend wire in either direction and isn’t restricted to springs.
Maybe room for 2 posts, yes, but I build it and still having problems with the wire feeding and use of 1 post,
so it’s not working as it should be