[Ben Conrad] received an interesting tool as a gift that purported to be a better mousetrap. It was a crescent wrench (made by the Crescent company, even) that didn’t have a tiny adjusting wheel like a traditional wrench. Instead, it had a slide running down the length of the handle. The idea is that you would push the slide to snug the wrench jaws against the bolt or nut, and that would be fast and easy compared to a conventional wrench. As [Ben] notes, though, it doesn’t work very well. Most of us would have just dumped it in the back of the tool chest or regifted it. [Ben] tore his apart to find out what was wrong with it.
A typical adjustable wrench has four parts. This one has 19 parts and looks like a conventional wrench with an extra slide and screw running down the length of the handle. [Ben] found the parts were poorly made, but that wasn’t the main problem.
If you’ve worked in a bio or chem lab, you’ve probably found yourself handling all manner of plastic. Test tubes, fixtures, clamps — there’s a cavalcade of this stuff that fattens up the order books of lab suppliers every quarter. Sometimes, though, the commercial solutions aren’t quite what you need. For [AtomicVirology], the solution was to 3D print custom lab accessories to make work easier.
The tube adapter allows the collection of 60 small samples without having to unload the fraction collector halfway through. That’s a big quality-of-life improvement for staffers using the equipment.
Some of the devices are straightforward, like simple holders for upright storage of centrifuge tubes. Others are fun twists on the theme, like the Millennium Falcon tube holder or one shaped like the Imperial Star Destroyer. Meanwhile, a resuable plastic tube cover serves as a way to protect tubes from light without the fuss of covering them in aluminium foil. It’s less wasteful, too!
Our favorite, though, is a simple adapter for holding fraction tubes in a AKTA fraction collection device. Stock, the AKTA device will hold 30 small tubes in the inside ring, and 30 larger tubes in the outside ring. Thanks to a simple printed part, though, it can be modified to hold 60 tubes of the smaller size. This allows the collection of 60 small fractions in a shorter period of time simply by moving the delivery head from the inner to the outer ring, without having to swap out 30 tubes halfway through a chromatography column, for example.
It goes to show that a 3D printer is good for more than just churning out Pikachus. It’s a Swiss Army knife for solving fiddly little problems without having to rely on some company to injection-mold you 10,000 examples of whatever it is you want. Of course, if you do want to injection mold something, we’ve covered how to do that before, as well.
Sometimes, with patience and luck, one can score a sweet deal on machinery. But for tools that weigh many hundreds of pounds? Buying it is only the beginning of the story. [Ben Katz] recently got a lathe and shared a peek at what was involved in moving a small (but still roughly 800 pound) Clausing 4901 lathe into its new home and getting it operational.
The lathe had sat unused in a basement, but was ready for a new home.
Moving such a stout piece of equipment cannot simply be done by recruiting a few friends and remembering to lift with the legs. This kind of machinery cannot be moved and handled except with the help of other machines, so [Ben] and friends used an engine hoist with a heavy-duty dolly to get it out of the basement it was in, and into the bed of a pickup truck. Separating the lathe from its base helped, as did the fact that the basement had a ground-level egress door which meant no stairs needed to be involved.
One also has to consider the machine’s ultimate destination, because not all floors or locations can handle nearly a thousand pounds of lathe sitting on them. In [Ben]’s case, that also meant avoiding a section of floor with a maintenance trapdoor when moving the lathe into the house. Scouting and knowing these things ahead of time can be the difference between celebratory pizza and deep dish disaster. Pre-move preparation also includes ensuring everything can physically fit through the necessary doorways ahead of time; a task that, if ignored, will eventually explain itself.
With that all sorted out, [Ben] dives into cleaning things up, doing function checks, and in general getting the lathe up and running. He provides some fantastic photos and details of this process, including shots of the 70s-era documentation and part diagrams.
Watch the first chips fly in the short video embedded below. And should you be looking at getting a lathe of your own? Check out our very own buyer’s guide to lathe options.
Hackers frequently find themselves reverse-engineering or interfacing to existing hardware and devices, and when that interface needs to be a physical one, it really pays to be able to take accurate measurements.
This is easy to do when an object is big enough to fit inside calipers, or at least straight enough to be laid against a ruler. But what does one do when things are complex shapes, or especially small? That’s where [Cameron]’s DIY digital optical comparator comes in, and unlike commercial units it’s entirely within the reach (and budget) of a clever hacker.
The Comparatron is based off a CNC pen plotter, but instead of a pen, it has a USB microscope attached with the help of a 3D-printed fixture. Serving as a background is an LED-illuminated panel, the kind useful for tracing. The physical build instructions are here, but the image should give most mechanically-minded folks a pretty clear idea of how it fits together.
If there’s one thing that for decades of desktop PCs have given us, it’s a seemingly endless supply of relatively capable power supplies. If you need 5 volts or 12 volts at a respectable current they’re extremely useful, so quite a few people have used them as bench power supplies. Some of these builds box up the mess of wires into a set of more useful connectors, but [Joao Pinheiro] has taken his to the next level with a very neat 3D printed case and a set of variable switching regulators to make a variable bench supply with a top voltage of 60 volts.
In many ways it’s a straightforward wiring job to build, but there’s an unexpected power resistor involved. It’s sinking the 5 volt line, and we’re guessing that some current is required here for the PC power supply to run reliably. The thought of a high power resistor dumping heat into a 3D printed case leads us to expect that things might become a little melty though.
Over the past few years we’ve seen several impressive projects where people try to manufacture integrated circuits using hobbyist tools. One of the most complex parts of this process is lithography: the step in which shapes are drawn onto a silicon wafer. There are several ways to do this, all of them rather complicated, but [Zachary Tong] over at Breaking Taps has managed to make one of them work quite well. He shares the results of his electron-beam lithography experiments in his latest video (embedded below).
In e-beam lithography, or EBL, shapes are drawn onto a wafer using an electron beam in a vacuum chamber. This is a slow process compared to optical lithography, as used in mass production, but it is reasonably simple and very flexible. [Zach] decided to use his electron microscope as an e-beam litho machine; although not designed for lithography, it has the same basic components as a real EBL machine and can act as a substitute with a bit of software tweaking.
[Zach] also has an atomic force microscope, which he used to make these beautiful images.The first step is to coat a wafer with a layer of e-beam resist. [Zach] used PMMA, commonly known as acrylic plastic, and applied it using spin coating after dissolving it in anisole. He then placed the wafer into the electron microscope and used it to scan an image. The image was then developed by rinsing the wafer in cold isopropyl alcohol.
[Zach] explains the whole process in detail in his video, including how he tuned all the parameters like resist thickness, beam strength, exposure time and development time, as well as the software tricks needed to persuade the microscope to function as a litho machine. In his best runs he managed to draw lines with a width of about 100 nanometers, which is seriously impressive for such a relatively simple setup.
If you’ve ever done maintenance or repair work on your bicycle, you’ll know that positioning a bike in your workshop isn’t trivial. You can use your bike’s kickstand, or lean it against a wall, but then you can’t work on the wheels. You can place it upside-down, but then the shifters and brake levers are hard to reach. You can hang it from the ceiling, but then you first need to install hooks and cables in hard-to-reach places. Ideally you’d want to have one of those standing clamp systems that the pros use, but their price is typically beyond a hobbyist’s budget.
Or at least, that’s how it used to be. As [Dane Kouttron] discovered, a simple wall-mounted bike clamp can be had for as little as $35 on eBay, and can easily be converted into a smart mobile repair stand. [Dane] fashioned an adjustable stand from some steel pipes he had lying around, and 3D-printed an adapter bracket to mount the bike clamp on it. This worked fine, but why stop at a simple clamp when you can expand it with, say, an integrated scale to weigh your bikes while you work on them? Continue reading “DIY Repair Stand Holds Your Bike And Weighs It”→
