Reuleaux Coaster

September 29, 2017 by Brian McEvoy 15 Comments

What’s better than a cool build? A cool build with valuable advice! Add a few flashy pictures and you have [Martin Raynsford]’s Reuleaux triangle coasters blog post. [Martin Raynsford] wanted to share his advice about the importance of using jigs and we’re sold. He was able to make 100 coasters in a single day and if he’s like us, after number ten, the work gets a little hurried and that is when mistakes are made.

Jig is a broad term when it comes to tooling but essentially, it holds your part in place while you work on it. In this case, a jig was made to hold the coaster pieces while they were glued together. [Martin Raynsford] didn’t need any registration marks on the wood so even the back is clean. If you look closely, the coaster is two parts, the frame and the triangle. Each part is three layers and they cannot separated once the glue dries. If any part doesn’t line up properly, the whole coaster is scrap wood.

This robot arm engraved 400 coasters in a day but maybe you would prefer if you simply had your beer delivered to your new coasters.

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Pogo Pin Serial Adapter Thing

August 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was working on a small project of mine, and I faced a rather large problem. I had to program nearly five hundred badges in a week. I needed a small programming adapter that would allow me to stab a few pads on a badge with six pogo pins, press a button, and move onto the next badge.

While not true for all things in life, sometimes you need to trade quality for expediency. This is how I built a terrible but completely functional USB to serial adapter to program hundreds of badges in just a few hours.

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Arduino And Encoder Form Precision Jig For Cutting And Drilling

June 4, 2017 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

“Measure twice, cut once” is great advice in every aspect of fabrication, but perhaps nowhere is it more important than when building a CNC machine. When precision is the name of the game, you need measuring tools that will give you repeatable results and preferably won’t cost a fortune. That’s the idea behind this Arduino-based measuring jig for fabricating parts for a CNC build.

When it comes to building on the cheap, nobody holds a candle to [HomoFaciens]. We’ve seen his garbage can CNC build and encoders from e-waste and tin cans, all of which gave surprisingly good results despite incorporating such compliant materials as particle board and scraps of plumber’s strapping. Looking to build a more robust machine, he finds himself in need of parts of consistent and accurate lengths, so he built this jig. A sled of particle board and a fence of angle aluminum position the square tube stock, and a roller with a paper encoder wheel bears on the tube under spring pressure. By counting pulses from the optical sensors, he’s able to precisely position the tube in the jig for cutting and drilling operations. See it in action in the video after the break.

If you’ve been following [HomoFaciens], you’ll no doubt see where he’s been going — build a low-end tool, use that to build a better one, and so on. We’re excited to see him moving into more robust materials, but we’ll miss the cardboard and paperclip builds.

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Lean Thinking Helps STEM Kids Build A Tiny Windfarm

January 18, 2017 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

When we see a new build by [Gord] from Gord’s Garage, we never know what to expect. He seems to be pretty skilled at whatever he puts his hand to, with a great design sense and impeccable craftsmanship. You might expect him to tone it down a little for a STEM-outreach wind turbine project then, but when you get a chance to impress 28 fifth and sixth graders, you might as well go for it.

Starting with an idea from his daughter’s teacher for wind turbines each kid could make, [Gord] applied a little lean methodology so the kids would be able to complete the build in the allotted time. The design is simple – a couple of old CDs holding vertical sections of PVC tubing to catch the breeze and spin neodymium magnets over four flat coils of magnet wire. It’s enough to light a single LED and perhaps a kid’s imagination.

As simple as the turbine is, the process of building it needed to be stripped of as much unnecessary work as possible, and [Gord] really shines here. He built jigs and fixtures galore, pre-built some assemblies, and set up well-organized workstations for each step of the build. Everything was clearly labeled, adult volunteers were trained using the video after the break, and a good time was had by all.

Sometimes the hack isn’t in the product but in the process, and [Gord] managed to hack a success out a potential disaster of disappointed kids. If getting a taste of [Gord]’s style makes you want to see more, check out his guitar fretting jig or his brake rotor mancave clock.

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Make Your Own Arduino Header Pins

December 13, 2016 by Al Williams 61 Comments

There are two kinds of people in the world (and, no, this isn’t a binary joke). People who love the Arduino, and people who hate it. If you’ve ever tried to use a standard prototype board to mount on an Arduino, you’ll know what kind of person you are. When you notice the pins aren’t on 0.1 inch centers, you might think, “What the heck were those idiots thinking!” Or, you might say, “How clever! This way the connectors are keyed to prevent mistakes.” From your choice of statement, we can deduce your feelings on the subject.

[Rssalnero] clearly said something different. We weren’t there, but we suspect it was: “Gee. I should 3D print a jig to bend headers to fit.” Actually, he apparently tried to do it by hand (we’ve tried it, too). The results are not usually very good.

He created two simple 3D printed jigs that let you bend an 8-pin header. The first jig bends the correct offset and the second helps you straighten out the ends again. You can see the result in the picture above.

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Home-made Adjustable Knife Jig

September 23, 2016 by Richard Baguley 25 Comments

When sharpening a knife, it is critical to have the knife at the right angle. A knife jig handles this for you, letting you focus on getting the edge right. You could just buy one, but where’s the fun in that? [origamimavin] decided to make his own adjustable knife jig using bits he bought from the hardware store for $27, and which you might have in your junk pile. Fortunately for us, he’s written up the process in excellent detail, explaining the how and why of each step.

He used a couple of tools that you might not have lying around (a bandsaw and a belt sander), but these could be easily replaced with their manual cousins, or your local hackerspace will doubtless provide you access to them. Either way, it’s a simple build which could help your knives keep their clean, sharp edge for years to come.

Internet Of Things Woodworking

August 31, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Woodworking is the fine art of building jigs. Even though we have Internet-connected toasters, thermostats, cars, and coffee makers, the Internet of Things hasn’t really appeared in the woodshop quite yet. That’s changing, though, and [Ben Brandt]’s Internet of Things box joint jig shows off exactly what cheap computers with a connection to the Internet can do. He’s fully automated the process of making box joints, all with the help of a stepper motor and a Raspberry Pi.

[Ben]’s electronic box joint jig is heavily inspired by [Matthias Wandel]’s fantastic screw advance box joint jig. [Matthias]’ build, which has become one of the ‘must build’ jigs in the modern woodshop, uses wooden gears to advance the carriage and stock across the kerf of a saw blade. It works fantastically, but to use this manual version correctly, you need to do a bit of math before hand, and in the worst-case scenario, cut another gear on the bandsaw.

[Ben]’s electronic box joint jig doesn’t use gears to move a piece of stock along a threaded rod. Stepper motors are cheap, after all, and with a Raspberry Pi, a stepper motor driver, a couple of limit switches, and a few LEDs, [Ben] built an Internet-enabled box joint jig that’s able to create perfect joints.

The build uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and Windows IoT Core to serve up a web page where different box joint profiles are stored. By lining the workpiece up with the blade and pressing start, this electronic box joint jig automatically advances the carriage to the next required cut. All [Ben] needs to do is watch the red and green LEDs and push the sled back and forth.

You can check out [Ben]’s video below. Thanks [Michael] for the tip.

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