A white man with red hair in pigtails under a brown cap holds an axe with a black head and wooden handle. The axe has a rectangular box welded onto the back side of its trapezoidal head.

Deadblow Axe Splits Wood With Minimal Rebound

February 16, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 17 Comments

Dead-blow hammers are well-known in the construction industry for minimizing rebound. [Jacob Fischer] is on a mission to bring this concept to splitting axes.

Over the course of several months, [Fischer] has been working on adding a dead-blow to a splitting axe. This fifth iteration uses a custom-forged head from blacksmith [Todd Elder] with a dead-blow box welded to the poll. The combination of the head geometry and the dead-blow distributing the delivery of force seems to result in a very effective splitting axe.

The dead-blow portion of the axe is a steel box filled with lead (Pb) BBs. Since the BBs are trailing the axe head within the box, the force from the BBs is delivered later than the initial impact of the steel axe head onto the block of wood, allowing the full force of the blow to be spread out over more time. Dead-blow hammers typically use polymers to further absorb any rebound energy, so there is some limit to the extent rebound can be reduced as seen in the testing portion of the video.

Looking for other ways to split wood? How about this cross-bladed axe or maybe a log splitter or two? If you’re curious about how they used to make axes in the old days, we’ve got you covered there too.

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Have A Ball With This 3D Printed Sphere-Making Machine

February 13, 2024 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Alright, everyone has 30 seconds to get all the jokes out of their system before we proceed with a look at this 3D printed wooden ball polisher.

Ready?

Theoretically, making a sphere out of any material should be easy. All you need to do is pick a point in space inside the material and eliminate everything more than a specified distance from that point. But in practice, sphere-making isn’t quite so simple. The machine [Fraens] presents in the video below is geared more toward the final polish than the initial forming, with a trio of gear motors set 120 degrees apart driving cup-shaped grinding pads.

Constant pressure on the developing sphere is maintained with a clever triangular frame with springs that pre-load the arms and pull them in toward the workpiece, but stop at the desired radius. The three grinding pads are fitted with sandpaper and constantly turn, wearing down the rough piece until it reaches the final diameter. The machine also supports more aggressive tooling, in the form of hole saws that really get to work on the rough blank. Check it out in the video below.

While we appreciate the fact that this is 3D printed, watching the vibrations it has to endure while the blank is still rough, not to mention all the dust and chips it creates, makes us think this machine might not stand up for long. So maybe letting this circular saw jig cut out a rough ball and using this machine for the final polish would be a good idea. Continue reading “Have A Ball With This 3D Printed Sphere-Making Machine” →

Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself

January 23, 2024 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as this fully automated CNC lathe work cell shows.

This build comes to us from the woodshop of [Maher Lagha], where he’s making wooden honey dippers. Wooden dowel blanks are dispensed from an infeed rack and chucked between centers on the headstock and pneumatic tailstock. A two-axis stage in front of the workpiece moves a tool against the spinning stock, carving out the honey dipper in just a few minutes. When the lathe work is done, the spindle stops, the tailstock pulls the honey dipper back off the headstock, and a pneumatic piston unceremoniously whacks the almost-finished part — it looks like it still needs a little manual post-processing — into a bin. Lather, rinse, repeat, profit.

[Maher] doesn’t provide many details, but just looking at the work cell shows a veritable feast of industrial automation equipment. The spindle and tailstock of the lathe sit on a bed made from a massive slab of aluminum extrusion, and the X- and Y-axes use linear rails and ballscrews. And mindful of the effects of wood chips on delicate mechanisms, [Maher] did a good job of containing the mess with a host of acrylic guards.

As we said when we saw [Maher]’s wooden coaster work cell a while back, the wood widget business must be pretty good to justify automation like this. What’s nice with both these rigs is that they look like they could be quickly reprogrammed and retooled to create other products. Pretty impressive.

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A black plastic trim piece from a vehicle interior. It has slight flecking in its texture. It is sitting on an off-white bench overlooking a workshop.

Can Car Parts Grow On Trees?

January 19, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 27 Comments

Cars don’t grow on trees, but Ford is designing car parts from olive tree cuttings. [via Electrek]

Ford is no stranger to designing parts from plants for their vehicles. Henry famously liked to beat on the Soy Bean Car with a blunted axe to tout the benefits of bioplastic panels. Researchers at Ford’s Cologne, Germany facility have detailed their work to use waste from olive orchards as part of a new biocomposite from the LIVE COMPOLIVE program.

Fibers from the olive tree cuttings are mixed with recycled plastic and injection molded to form panels. The video below features interior panels that are currently made with traditional plastics that could be swapped over to the new composite. Since these cuttings are a waste product from food production, there isn’t the tension akin to that presented via biofuels vs food. We’re curious what Precious Plastics could do with this, especially if the fibers are able to reinforce the matrix.

If you want to see some other unusual uses for waste wood, why not checkout a “paper” bottle or 3D printing with sawdust?

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Feeding The Fire By Robot

January 15, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

It might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but one of the more carbon-neutral ways of heating one’s home is by burning wood. Since the carbon for the trees came out of the air a geologically insignificant amount of time ago, it’s in effect solar energy with extra steps. And with modern stoves and well-seasoned wood, air pollution is minimized as well. The only downside is needing to feed the fire frequently, which [Anders] solved by building a robot.

[Anders]’ system is centered around a boiler, a system which typically sits in a utility area like a basement and directs its heat to the home via another system, usually hot water. An Arduino Mega controls the system of old boat winches and various motors, with a grabber arm mounted at the end. The arm pinches each log from end to end, allowing it to grab the uneven logs one at a time. The robot also opens the boiler door and closes it again when the log is added, and then the system waits for the correct set of temperature conditions before grabbing another log and adding it. And everything can be monitored remotely with the help of an ESP32.

The robot is reportedly low-maintenance as well, thanks to its low speed and relatively low need for precision. The low speed also makes it fairly safe to work around, which was an important consideration because wood still needs to be added to a series of channels every so often to feed the robot, but this is much less often than one would have to feed logs into a boiler if doing this chore manually. It also improves on other automated wood-burning systems like pellet stoves, since you can skip the pellet-producing middleman step. It also eliminates the need to heat your home by burning fossil fuels, much like this semi-automated wood stove.

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Watch Time Roll By On This Strange, Spiral Clock

November 13, 2023 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Build Some Stuff] created an unusual spiral clock that’s almost entirely made from laser-cut wood, even the curved and bendy parts.

The living hinge is one thing, but getting the spacing, gearing, and numbers right also takes work.

The clock works by using a stepper motor and gear to rotate the clock’s face, which consists of a large dial with a spiral structure. Upon this spiral ramp rolls a ball, whose position relative to the printed numbers indicates the time. Each number is an hour, so if the ball is halfway between six and seven, it’s 6:30. At the center of the spiral is a hole, which drops the ball back down to the twelve at the beginning of the spiral so the cycle can repeat.

The video (embedded below) demonstrates the design elements and construction of the clock in greater detail, and of particular interest is how the curved wall of the spiral structure consists of a big living hinge, a way to allow mostly rigid materials to flex far beyond what they are used to. Laser cutting is well-suited to creating living hinges, but it’s a technique applicable to 3D printing, as well.

Thanks to [Kelton] for the tip!

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Rocket Stove Efficiently Heats Water

August 4, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 19 Comments

Rocket stoves are an interesting, if often overlooked, method for cooking or for generating heat. Designed to use biomass that might otherwise be wasted, such as wood, twigs, or other agricultural byproducts, they are remarkably efficient and perform relatively complete combustion due to their design, meaning that there are fewer air quality issues caused when using these stoves than other methods. When integrated with a little bit of plumbing, they can also be used to provide a large amount of hot water to something like an off-grid home as well.

[Little Aussie Rockets] starts off the build by fabricating the feed point for the fuel out of steel, and attaching it to a chimney section. This is the fundamental part of a rocket stove, which sucks air in past the fuel, burns it, and exhausts it up the chimney. A few sections of pipe are welded into the chimney section to heat the water as it passes through, and then an enclosure is made for the stove to provide insulation and improve its efficiency. The rocket stove was able to effortlessly heat 80 liters of water to 70°C in a little over an hour using a few scraps of wood.

The metalworking skills of [Little Aussie Rockets] are also on full display here, which makes the video well worth watching on its own. Rocket stoves themselves can be remarkably simple for how well they work, and can even be built in miniature to take on camping trips as a lightweight alternative to needing to carry gas canisters, since they can use small twigs for fuel very easily. We’ve also seen much larger, more complex versions designed for cooking huge amounts of food.

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