At Sinking Valley Woodworks, we take on odd jobs from time to time. One of these odd jobs was some car parts for an old Bentley restoration. Wood was a much more common material in cars in that era.
This particular piece is what goes at the top of the windshield and connects to the roof. It has curves on all faces, and compound curves on most. The new part was made out of Ash, carved on a CNC router, and finished by hand.
Below is some before and after pictures.
Here is a closeup of a 3D printed chess piece. We designed them in solidworks and printed them using a MakerBox Replicator 2 with PLA plastic. It’s on the chess board dining room table.
Here is the chess “board”
Here are the ceramic tiles going into the chess table before the bar top was applied:
We had a litter of five kittens three weeks ago:
Here they are – sleeping or nursing
We have two “named” so far. One is named P.J which stands for Patches Junior because she looked a lot like her mom (who is named Patches). The other is named Dozer because he is huge and pushes the other kittens out of the way to nurse.
Here is Dozer, P.J, and the others sleeping:
P.J. is on the top left and Dozer is the one closest to the camera (that looks like a tiger).
They all have their eyes open now, but unfortunately they were mostly sleeping when I took this picture:
What should we name the other three?
I have been rather impressed with the accuracy of our CAMAster Cobra 508 ATC CNC Router. Here is a picture of a similar machine:
For having a travel of over 5′ x 8′, it still handles the fine details with quite a bit of repeatable accuracy. I helped to make a candle holder out of a piece of curly oak. It turned out to be very pretty.
In the following picture, you can see 4 toolpaths. The large circular pocket (0.25″ deep), the small inner pocket, the radius around the edge of the circle, and the engraving.
The rest of the project was completed using a bandsaw and conventional tools. CNC brings a lot to the table (pun intended), but it is more amazing what a craftsman can do by hand.
Did you know that Okuma, who is a manufacturer of state of the art CNC machines, hand scrapes all the seven components of a machine foundation?
From http://www.okuma.com/handscraping:
Unfortunately, there is still no technology available to achieve the geometric precision that hand scraping does. Components need to be aligned within a millionth of an inch. And it’s where that kind of precision is needed that makes it even more critical: your machine’s foundation. The seven components of a machine’s foundation simply must be hand scraped to create ideal flatness, to develop proper oil pockets, and to achieve those tight tolerances.
In the world of CNC routers, we talk in “thousandths of an inch”. But in the above, they are talking in “millionths of an inch” and “by hand” in the same paragraph. That is simply amazing to me.
Here are some pictures of the finished product. The sum of some of the efforts of man, machine, and nature.
The Distance is an online magazine that features different businesses in each article. I recently read an article titled “Life of Pie” which was written by Wailin Wong.
Do you like your delivered pizzas hot? If you do, thank Ingrid Kosar. Ingrid Kosar invented the pizza delivery bag that keeps pizzas hot until the pizza delivery man gets it to your door.
You can read all about the Life of Pie here: https://thedistance.com/thermal-bags-by-ingrid/
We saw four geese on our property the other day! Maybe we should tell them they are late in flying south :)
Here are a few facts on geese.
Some Geese do amazing things while they are migrating. There is a species in Asia, Bar-headed Geese (Aner indicus), that migrate over the tallest mountain in the world (can you guess?) in the Himalayan Mountains. The air temperature is as low as -60 Degrees F.
Now that is a “wow”.
References:
We have some old hand forged nails. The nails were made by a blacksmith.
We polished them with a Dremel tool using a wire brush. Did you know that a Dremel tool can spin 500 times per second? Wow. We wore safety glasses to protect our eyes.
Here is a polished nail.
Here are some facts on old nails.
Here is the a chart for nails. (Copyright Thomas Visser)
You can read more about it here: http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/203/nails.html
That is all for now!
References:
We got two kittens in the beginning of summer, but they are teenager-cats now.
This is Shadow, who is a very good hunter. She only likes to go to places her sister has already explored.
This is Shadow holding a chipmunk that she caught!
This is Patches, she is the explorer. When we first got the kittens, Patches explored the house. I guess that after a while Patches must have told Shadow that it was safe because Shadow started going with her everywhere.
This is Patches exploring our brush pile.
That’s all for now!
Here is a big spider that we found while raking leaves today.
Spiders are air-breathing arthropods. They are found in every continent except Antarctica.
Spiders mostly prey on bugs, but few large species prey on large birds and lizards. Argh, that is scary!
To find out more about spiders click here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider
That’s all for now.
The Gahooa Perspective 