Machining A Honing Jig Will Keep Skills Sharp

March 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

[Amy Makes Stuff] has long used a pair of diamond honing blocks to freehand sharpen planes, chisels, and all the other dull things around the shop. Although this method works fairly well, the results are often inconsistent without some kind of jig to hold the blade securely as it’s being sharpened. These types of devices are abundant and cheap to buy, but as [Amy] says in the video after the break, then she doesn’t get to machine anything. Boy, do we know that feeling.

[Amy] was able to make this completely out of stuff she had lying around, starting with a block of scrap aluminium that eventually gets cut into the two halves of the jig. The video is full of tips and tricks and it’s really interesting to see [Amy]’s processes up close. Our favorite part has to be that grippy knob that expands and contracts the jig. [Amy] made it by drilling a bunch of holes close to the outside edge of a circle, and then milled away the edge until she had a fully fluted knob. Once she had the jig finished, she upgraded her honing blocks by milling a new home for them out of milky-white high-density polyethylene.

Mills are fantastic tools to have, but they’re a bit on the pricey side. If you’re just getting started, why not convert a drill press into a mill? Wouldn’t that be more fun that just buying one?

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Chisel Away At FPGA Development

October 28, 2019 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Most of the time if you were to want to develop for an FPGA, you might turn to Verilog or VHDL. Both of these are quite capable, but they are also firmly rooted in languages that are old-fashioned by today’s standards. There have been quite a few attempts to treat those languages as an output to some other tool — either a higher-level language or a graphical tool. One recent effort is a toolchain that starts with Chisel.

The idea behind Chisel is to provide Scala with Verilog-like constructs. If you want, you can use it as a “super Verilog” taking advantage of classes and other features. However, Chisel also allows you to create generators that produce different output Verilog depending on how you call them. True, you can do some of this with Verilog modules, but it is much easier with Chisel. Chisel uses Firrtl to convert what you ask it to do into Verilog for different FPGA and ASIC targets.

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Making An Ultrasonic Cutter For Post-processing Tiny 3D Prints

January 7, 2019 by Donald Papp 57 Comments

An ultrasonic knife is a blade that vibrates a tiny amount at a high frequency, giving the knife edge minor superpowers. It gets used much like any other blade, but it becomes far easier to cut through troublesome materials like rubber or hard plastics. I was always curious about them, and recently made my own by modifying another tool. It turns out that an ultrasonic scaling tool intended for dental use can fairly easily be turned into a nimble little ultrasonic cutter for fine detail work.

Cheap ultrasonic scaler. The blue disk is for adjusting power. Foot switch not shown.

I originally started thinking about an ultrasonic knife to make removing supports from SLA 3D prints easier. SLA resin prints are made from a smooth, hard plastic and can sometimes require a veritable forest of supports. These supports are normally removed with flush cutters, or torn off if one doesn’t care about appearances, but sometimes the density of supports makes this process awkward, especially on small objects.

I imagined that an ultrasonic blade would make short work of these pesky supports, and for the most part, I was right! It won’t effortlessly cut through a forest of support bases like a hot knife through butter, but it certainly makes it easier to remove tricky supports from the model itself. Specifically, it excels at slicing through fine areas while preserving delicate features. Continue reading “Making An Ultrasonic Cutter For Post-processing Tiny 3D Prints” →