Have Chainsaw, Will Travel

May 2, 2017 by James Hobson 31 Comments

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you strapped a chainsaw motor to a tricycle? Turns out the worst that happened to [ThisDustin] and his friends is that it turned out hilariously awesome.

This aptly-named ‘chainsawtrike’ isn’t much in the way of comfort, so a pair of foot pegs had to be welded onto the front forks, along with a mount for the chainsaw motor. The rear axle had to be replaced with 5/8″ keyed stock, trimmed to fit the trike wheel and secured with keyed hubs. [ThisDustin] and crew also needed an intermediate sprocket to act as a reduction gear.

After a test that saw the chain jump off the sprockets and working out a few kinks — like the ability to turn — the chainsawtrike can haul around its rider at a pretty decent clip. Check out the video of it in action after the break.

Continue reading “Have Chainsaw, Will Travel” →

Path To Craftsmanship: Don’t Buy Awful Safety Gear

November 14, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 70 Comments

A while back I tried to make a case for good safety disciple as a habit that, when proactively pursued, can actually increase the quality of your work as a side effect. In those comments and in other comments since then I’ve noticed that some people really hate safety gear. Now some of them hated them for a philosophical reason, “Ma granpap didn’t need ’em, an’ I don’t neither”, or ,”Safety gear be contributin’ to the wuss’ness of the modern personage an’ the decline o’ society.” However, others really just found them terribly uncomfortable and restricting.

In this regard I can help a little. I’ve spent thousands of terrible long hours in safety gear working in the chemical industry. I was also fortunate to have a company who frequently searched for the best safety equipment as part of their regular program. I got to try out a lot.

Continue reading “Path To Craftsmanship: Don’t Buy Awful Safety Gear” →

Improving 3D Printed Gears With… Hot Water

July 3, 2016 by Donald Papp 44 Comments

Being able to print out custom gears is one area where 3D printing can really shine, and [Karl Lew] has been busy doing exactly that with pinion gears printed in PLA and mounted to stepper motor shafts, but there are tradeoffs. Pinion gears need to grip a motor shaft tightly – normally done with a screw through the gear and onto the motor shaft. But a motor and its shaft can get quite warm when doing a lot of work, and a tight screw on a hot motor’s shaft will transmit that heat into the PLA, which can then deform.

[Karl Lew] managed to improve things in an unusual way: using a hot water bath to anneal the gear while it is attached to the stepper shaft. Annealing PLA has the effect of increasing the crystallinity of the material, which – according to an article going into some detail about the process of annealing PLA – increases stiffness, strength, and heat deflection. The annealing process also shrinks the part slightly, which happens to result in a very tight joint made between the gear and the slotted stepper shaft if the gear is annealed while connected to the motor.

Continue reading “Improving 3D Printed Gears With… Hot Water” →

Laser-cut Cardboard Planetary Gearset Is Pretty, But Useless

November 22, 2015 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

[Shane] made a project that speaks directly to our heart — combining laser cutting, cardboard, and gears. How could it be any better? Well, it could do anything. But that’s quibbling. It’s fun enough just to watch the laser-cut cardboard planetary gears turn. (Video after the break.)

It was made on a laser cutter using the gear extensions for generating gears in Inkscape, everybody’s favorite free SVG editor.

In his writeup, [Shane] touches on all of the relevant details: all of the gear pitches need to be the same, and the number of teeth in the sun gear (in the center) needs to equal the number of teeth in the ring (outside) divided by the number of planets (orbiting, in the middle). So far so good.

Continue reading “Laser-cut Cardboard Planetary Gearset Is Pretty, But Useless” →

3D Printed Lens Gears For Pro-grade Focus Pulling

November 17, 2015 by Dan Maloney 29 Comments

Key Grip, Gaffer, Best Boy – any of us who’ve sat through every last minute of a Marvel movie to get to the post-credits scene – mmm, schawarma! – have seen the obscure titles of folks involved in movie making. But “Focus Puller”? How hard can it be to focus a camera?

Turns out there’s a lot to the job, and in a many cases it makes sense to mechanize the task. Pro cinematic cameras have geared rings for just that reason, and now your DSLR lens can have them too with customized, 3D printed follow-focus gears.

Unwilling to permanently modify his DSLR camera lens and dissatisfied with after-market lens gearing solutions, [Jaymis Loveday] learned enough OpenSCAD to generate gears from 50mm to 100mm in diameter in 0.5mm increments for a snug friction fit. Teamed up with commercially available focus pulling equipment, these lens gears should really help [Jaymis] get professional results from consumer lenses.

Unfortunately, [Jaymis] doesn’t include any video of the gears in action, but the demo footage shown below presumably has some shots that were enabled by his custom gears. And even if it doesn’t, there are some really cool shots in it worth watching.

And for the budding cinematographers out there without access to a 3D printer, there’s always this hardware store solution to focus pulling.

Continue reading “3D Printed Lens Gears For Pro-grade Focus Pulling” →

Hackaday Fail: A $3000 Prototype That Doesn’t Work

May 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 113 Comments

[Dan Royer] is hard at work building his own personal robot army. Robots mean motors, and motors mean gearboxes. In [Dan]’s case, gearboxes mean $3000 wasted on a prototype that doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? He doesn’t know, and we don’t either.

[Dan] would like to use small but fast DC motors for his robots coupled to a gearbox to step down the speed and increase the torque. The most common way of doing this is with a planetary gear set, but there’s a problem with the design of planetary gears – there is inherent backlash and play between the gears. This makes programming challenging, and the robot imprecise.

A much better way to gear down a small DC motor is a hypocycloid gear. If you’ve ever seen the inside of a Wankel engine, this sort of gearing will look very familiar: a single gear is placed slightly off-axis inside a ring gear. On paper, it works. In reality, not so much.

[Dan] spent $3000 on a prototype hypocycloid gearbox that doesn’t turn without binding or jamming. The gear was made with incredible tolerances and top quality machining, but [Dan] has a very expensive paper weight sitting on his desk right now.

If anyone out there has ever designed or machined a hypocycloid gearbox that works, your input is needed. The brightest minds [Dan] met at the Bring A Hack event at Maker Faire last weekend could only come up with. ‘add more lasers’, but we know there’s a genius machinist out there that knows exactly how to make this work.

Hackaday Fail is a column which runs every now and again. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your past failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Workbench Eye Candy From Around The World

April 27, 2015 by George Graves 14 Comments

The workbench. We’re always looking for ways to make the most out of the tools we have, planning our next equipment purchase, all the while dealing with the (sometimes limited) space we’re allotted. Well, before you go off and build your perfect electronics lab, this forum thread on the EEVblog should be your first stop for some extended ~~drooling~~ research.

You’ll find a great discussion about everything from workbench height, size, organization, shelf depth, and lighting, with tons of photos to go with it. You’ll also get a chance to peek at how other people have set up their labs. (Warning, the thread is over 1000 posts long, so you might want to go grab a snack.)

We should stop for a moment and give a special note to those of you who are just beginning in electronics. You do not need to have a fancy setup to get started. Most of these well equipped labs is the result of being in the industry for years and years. Trust us when we say, you can get started in electronics with nothing more than your kitchen table, a few tools, and a few parts. All of us started that way. So don’t let anything you see here dissuade you from jumping in. As proof, we’ve seen some amazingly professional work being done with the most bare-bones of tools (and conversely, we seen some head-scratching projects by people with +$10,000 of dollars of equipment on their desk.)

Here’s some links that you might find handy when setting up a lab. [Kenneth Finnegan] has a great blog post on how his lab is equipped. And [Dave Jones] of the EEVblog has a video covering the basics. One of the beautiful things about getting started in electronics is that used and vintage equipment can really stretch your dollars when setting up a lab. So if you’re looking into some vintage gear, head on over to the Emperor of Test Equipment. Of course no thread about workbenches would be complete with out a mention of Jim Williams’ desk. We’ll leave the discussion about workbench cleanliness for the comments.