Sindrian Arts

I figured it out!

As is often the case, after stepping away from the problem for a bit I came up with a simple solution:

First, secure one side of the gantry to the table (or have a friend hold it).  Next, apply power to the machine, but engage an e-stop.  Now take a long square (I used a drywall T-square) and place the short side flush against the side of the gantry that is secured so the long side is pointing across the table to the unsecured side.  Make sure that one edge of the long side is lined up with some landmark that appears on both sides of the gantry (I used the vertical edge shown in the above pic).  Finally, go over to the unsecured side of the gantry, manually deflect it until the same landmark is lined up with the appropriate edge of the square, and then release the e-stop switch to apply power, thus locking it in.

Granted, this is not a super-precise method, but given that you’ll probably get your deflection down to less than an eighth of an inch over the entire width of your table, it should be close enough for most work.

Ok, back to making Kickstarter rewards!

My apologies for the long silence; the last month has been a bit of a rollercoaster.

Right after I finished milling out the parts for the next Kikori gantry up at MakeIt Labs, it got shut down.  This meant that instead of getting to work on the kickstarter rewards I had to dismantle my entire operation up there, move everything down to my new space at the Artisan’s Asylum (living up to their name, as always), and build a new gantry first.

If you’ve been following my photostream on Flickr, you’ve watched as I assembled a new Kikori gantry.  While I did find a few minor things that needed tweaking, for the most part it came together beautifully.  This was especially encouraging since the Kikori up at MakeIt was having all sorts of mysterious issues that prevented it from maintaining positional accuracy (given that the new machine has none of these issues, I’m told that it could’ve been caused by a “dirty” power supply in the MakeIt building, which would’ve caused the machine to miss steps).  This showed that even under a worse-case scenario, the Kikori is still capable of self-replication.

In rebuilding the Kikori I also tried out a couple different methods of driving the X axis.  The problem I was having with the original setup of using a single NEMA 23 motor to drive sprockets on both sides of the gantry was that I’d get significant twisting along the drive shafts; enough that the gantry would ‘chatter’ as is moved in that direction.  My first solution was to upgrade to a NEMA 34 motor which uses a 1/2″ drive shaft instead of the 23′s 1/4″.  While this did eliminate the chatter, it also revealed that without the twisting  rod acting like a spring, the motor wasn’t powerful enough.  Finally, I decided to try using two seperate NEMA 23 motors to directly drive the sprockets on either side.  This proved to be by far the best solution: it gave me the best strength, the smoothest motion, and also eliminated the need for drive shafts, bearings, and couplers.

The Kikori is now performing beautifully, maintaining accuracy to within 1/32 of an inch even at feed rates of 100 IPM!  This means that production of the Kickstarter rewards has finally begun.  I’ll be milling out the sets of gantry parts first, then working my way down the list of rewards.  I hope to get them all out within a month, but we’ll see how things work out.

This also means that I’m about to start selling Kikori kits as well!  After all the changes and additions, it looks like I’ll just be able to keep it under the $5,000 goal, but I’m going to try to do a special introductory sale to get things moving.  I’ll send out an announcement soon!

The new couplers are doing great!

Mostly.  I think.

Since I’m done traveling for the next few months, I finally got to spend some time working on the Kikori last week. I wanted to mill out one of my tablet stands, but to make sure everything was staying nice and accurate, I did a test first.  I decided to drill a hole at a known location, do an air-cut of the hole pattern, and then have the machine return to the hole location to see if it had gotten off at all.

It had.  Only about 1/16th of an inch in X, sometimes in Y (I tested it multiple times), but it had.

The two most likely culprits are set screws working themselves loose and couplers slipping.  I applied loctite to the set screws before I left, so today they should be set.  I’ll make registration marks on the couplers to check on slippage there.  Wish me luck!

Remember the coupler issues I was having?  Fixed ‘em!

While I was in Oakland I did a fair bit of research on what my options were, and finally decided on these “light duty” couplers from McMaster-Carr (Part no. 6115K18).  As you can see, not only are they aluminum (instead of plastic (nylon?) like the last ones), they are HUGE.  You can see the size difference here.  I actually had to dremel out the x-axis motor mount to get it to fit, but thankfully it didn’t need much.

After slapping those puppies in and tightening up some things (I really need to remember to put loctite on those set screws), I milled out a couple new test pieces.

Beautiful.  Not only did they have wonderfully smooth edges, free of steps and ripples, but they also fit together snugly!  This means that they are likely within 0.01″ of their intended dimensions.  I’ll have a better sense of it’s accuracy once I mill a harder material like masonite.

Of course, now that my machine is finally working well I’ve got to go to Chicago for my nephew’s bris, but once I get back on Monday, I’LL FINALLY GET TO MAKE STUFF!!!

I’m very excited.

Ok, so we’re really getting close now.

3 days left and just $1300 left to raise.  Hopefully, this new reward will help us get over this final hump.

Allow me to present the cleverly-named vial box!

I designed this box after noticing that several friends of mine who are fans of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (commonly known as BPAL) had piles of these small vials called ‘imps’ with no good way to store them.  Some people use bullet boxes, but this requires wrapping the label around the imp, and makes it impossible to tell at a glance what you’ve got.

I knew I could do better.

After playing around in my CAD program I came up with this clever system that would hold each imp in such a way as to make all the labels easily read and each imp accessible.  It also closes securely, keeping the imps safe from harmful sunlight.

The box is 10″ x 9.75″ x 3″, holds fifty imps, and I’ll do a custom bit of inlay work on the lid! It’s available now for a pledge of just $60!  Hurry, the project ends Sunday!

The Kikori is now at MakeIt Labs!

Granted, right now it’s little more than a pile of MDF and various bits of gantry, but it shouldn’t take long to put back together.

My biggest concern right now is the torsion box.  Unfortunately, very few of the ribs survived the move intact; most of them are in two if not three pieces.  Thankfully, I have all the pieces and it’s clear which pieces go together. This means that while I can reassemble the torsion box, but I’m not sure how strong it will be.

My current plan is to put it back together as-is and immediately use it to make a new set of ribs out of 3/4″ MDF instead of 1/2″.  This means I would have to use the reverse side of the skins since these new ribs would no longer fit into the slots the original ribs fit into, but given that the slots were too tight to begin with, this might actually be a good thing.  Another option is to make them out of 1/2″ MDF again, and simply make them taller this time, increasing their strength that way.  I could sand out the slots to make them looser.

Of course, if the reassembled torsion box seems fairly strong even with the broken ribs I might just use it as-is. After all, having a perfectly flat milling plane is only super-important if you’re doing 3D carving; it doesn’t matter as much for simple profiles.  Besides, I’m itching to start prototyping the launcher!

The 2′x4′ Kikori is out!

The MDO parts are available now for just $400, but hurry; I’m only offering five at that reward level.  After that, they’ll go up to $500.

The reason they aren’t cheaper is because  only nine pieces actually change between the 4′ version and the 2′ version.  However, this also means that the 2′x4′ Kikori gantry has the ability to upgrade itself by making only nine new pieces!

I’m also offering the mechanical and full kits at reduced reward levels: for the first three backers the mechanical kit is only $2000, and the full kit just $2500!

In other news, since the Artisan’s Asylum is going to be moving to a new location, it’ll be closed during the month of August.  This means that even if I got the Kikori set up there for July, I’d have to turn right back around and tear it down again, and then have no place to work for an entire month.  As you can imagine, I was not happy about this prospect, so I got to work finding some place to work.

I remembered that Joseph Schlesinger, one of the guys who helped me build the the blackFoot at the Asylum, had just moved MakeIt Labs (a “Makerspace/Hackerspace/Open-Access Workshop”) into a new space up in Nashua, so I shot him an email asking if I could set up the Kikori there.  Sure enough, a few emails later and he’d talked his board into letting me set up shop there for a couple months!  This means I’ll be able to get rewards out for the Kickstarter project much sooner.

I’ve also been hard at work finishing up another reward: the launcher!

While it’s designed to launch tennis balls, it’ll launch pretty much anything under 4″ in diameter: water balloons, snow balls, confetti…  It’s designed to be adjustable, so you can alter its strength without swapping out the elastic.

I can imagine all sorts of uses for this, from playing fetch with your dog to ambushing your friends with blasts of glitter.  However, I know I’ve just barely scratched the surface.  What would you use something like this for?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the $600 reward on my Kickstarter Project.

Many people were asking if the MDO pieces came with any mechanical components as well, which they do not.  However, as the questions kept coming (long after I added the answer to the FAQ section), I realized that people might want this option.

I had held off on this before now because most of the necessary hardware can be bought locally.  However, I also know that those parts that cannot be sourced locally can be a royal pain to find.

I eventually decided to bite the bullet: I did some research, found some additional sources of various parts, crunched some numbers, and finally came up with two new rewards:

The first kit, available at the $2500 level, will have all the mechanical parts necessary to build a Kikori gantry.  This means it comes will all the nuts, bolts, cross-dowels, aluminum rails, sprockets, roller chain, and other various mechanical bits that are needed to put a Kikori gantry together, as well as the MDO gantry pieces themselves.

The second kit will be available for $3300, and will have everything the first one does plus the stepper motors, electronics, cables, and router!

Neither kit comes with a computer or a table, since the former depends on personal taste and the latter would be far too big to ship.

What do you think?  Are there other possible combinations you’d like to see?  Let me know!

Last Friday we finally launched our project on Kickstarter! We’ve already gotten 12% of our goal and were mentioned on BoingBoing!

Right now we’re working on more rewards, so if there’s something particular you’d like to see, let us know!

Ok, the kikori has officially surpassed my expectations.

A couple days ago it made it’s first thing: a balisong screwdriver I designed which you can see here.  I wasn’t that impressed with this since a couple pieces didn’t survive the milling process and the ones that did didn’t fit together that well.  While reviewing the video I took of the milling it occurred to me that one reason for this might have been very small movement of the spoil board the material had been taped to (spoil board is what goes under your workpiece so that when you cut all the way through it you’re not cutting into your table).  Sure enough, when I compared the first and last frames of the video you could clearly see a small shift.

The next day, with this in mind, I taped down the spoil board and ran a set of parts for another design of mine: a folding tablet stand (pictured above).  Right after the job was done I could tell there was a lot of improvement, but I didn’t see just how much until I cleaned off the parts and started putting them together.

This picture shows the main arm of the stand that has a slot cut in it.  Sitting perfectly in the slot is another piece.  When I designed this stand I made the smaller piece to be just 0.02″ narrower than the slot so it would sit in there loosely.  When I measured these milled parts the actual size difference was 0.022″.  This means that my machine was only 0.002″ off.

!!!

That is a ridiculously small error margin, far smaller than I thought I’d ever achieve with this machine.  I’m amazed.

Unfortunately, I was unable to use this first set of parts because I discovered some small flaws with the actual design, but an hour later I had applied the necessary changes and I milled out the version pictured above.  I accidentally milled those parts out at twice the speed of the first set, so they don’t have the same tight tolerances, but they still fit together beautifully.

Today I’ll finish up some other designs and perhaps get to some more milling tomorrow.  I’ve started a new Flickr set called Kikori Work where I’ll be posting pictures of stuff as I mill it out.  Now that the kikori’s up and running, I’ll probably be adding to it quite frequently, so be sure to check it out for the latest stuff.

I’m also getting ready to launch my Kickstarter project sometime next week, so stay tuned for updates on that.  I’ve got a potential list of rewards I’ll post here soon, and I’d love everyone’s feedback.