The metal shaper man’s blog

I love these blogs of people who have these perfect projects where everything works perfectly…. Well this ain’t one of those blogs…..

I was mowing my lawn last Sunday with my recycled push-mower and a broke a roller bracket.  No problem… I’ll just make a new one..

So.. I find a piece of steel in the scrap box that’s about right and mount in my mill and start planning away..  This is just taking way longer turning cranks since the material appears to be hardened, so…. I figure, I have this darn shaper with the auto crossfeed, I might as well use it.  Fine… great idea. After all the name of this site is metalshaperman.com

So… I start machining with a bit I had from turning, which totally doesn’t have the right geometry.  It works but belt on the motor is slipping quite a bit.  The belt is really worn so, I get a new one.. Somewhere between a 4L270 and a 4L260…  I get the 4L270 and the thing is loose (but I still have adjustment).  I bring it back to my local Napa and get the 4L260 and the Belt to too tight (No adjustment)..  I figure the original was a 4L260 and it needed to work in a little… So.. I fire up the shaper and I goes a couple of strokes and the friking motor seizes… What the… Anyway, I think what happened is that the motor pulley moved and when is jambed against the housing.  At least that’s what I hope.

Anyway… I figured I thought it be nice to take a couple of pictures of the bracket and the work in progress on the shaper.  So… I’m having all these issues getting a picture uploaded, and now I need to reduce the resolution of my pictures cause they are just way too big….  I found a nice link on how to do that…. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-518662.html

So… my quite time in the morning is all burned up with nothing to show.
Hopefully…. this is not the start of a bad day….

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My little one has been asking me make her a computer game and  some toys out of plastic…  Can’t be wood or metal… Needs to be plastic.

Hmmm. The computergame I think I can handle…. The toys out of plastic is on the todo list..

Wth the weather cooling off, someone being back in school, this has made it convenient again for me to be messing around on the computer….

Heekscad is still a little bit too much for me so, slowing down and going through OpenGl is a good thing.

I stumbled across a very good tutorial series on OpenGl at this site. http://www.videotutorialsrock.com/index.php

It’s actually quite interesting too me.  I’ve been taking it slow to minize brain overload and so far I’ve made why way into part 1 textures.  I’m making a little side trips going through the BMP file format in wikipedia. which is rather interesting in itself.  (Have you hugged you little endian today..)

I managed to get my graphics card really working a few weeks back so this has been fun for me.

I am really impressed by this tutorial…  When I become proficient at OpenCascade I wouldn’t mind doing something like this.

The plastic toy thing is really intriguing to me.   Originally I told my child that oh….we we need to injection mold a toy…. Images of building Vince Gingery Injection Modeling machine and complex machining of a mold came to mind….. Yuckk…. (Way too many irons on the fire for that)… But.. Yah figure I get this OpenGL game thing under my belt… Start doing the Heekscad thing….  What the hey…. Have my child design some toys using solid modeling… Port it out to and STL file and do some rapid prototyping….

There’s actually an open source Rapid Prototyping project.  Man…. there is just way too much interesting stuff out there….. Darn…. I’m going to need to get the rest of the Linistepper drivers build up that are collecting dust…. Hmmm.. I wonder if six year old can solder?  (Just kidding…. )

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