Sindrian Arts

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!

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.

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?