WhatHaveWeLearned

So I picked up a Meta Quest 2 the other day. It’s great, it really is. I also returned it the other day. Nah, not because it was bad or anything. I decided it was worth the extra 250 to get the Quest 3. Quest 3 is also fantastic. My […]

As they say, mistakes were made. That used to be a gear. Specifically the gear that tied the handwheel to the lead screw that moved the spindle up and down in my surface grinder. I picked this surface grinder up for $500 somewhat recently. If you aren’t familiar with this […]

Well the upgrades are done and the printer is working exceptionally well. As you can see, a lot has changed. This was a ridiculous process and took all of my free time for 3 weeks straight. BL Touch As you can see there’s a BL Touch on my carriage now. […]

I was working on the dust collector system when my main 3D printer started printing what could safely be called trash. After some poking around I discovered the extruder filament pinch wheel gears were missing the majority of their teeth. You can see the stripped teeth right behind the nylon […]

I am a big fan of 3D printing as you can see above. I’ve been involved with 3D printing for something like 14 or 15 years. You can see my RepRap Mendel in the pic next to an lightly modified Tevo Tornado. Of course the RepRap has modern electronics, ramps […]

Alright time for another concurrent project. This time we’re going to build a dust collection system for the wood shop. If you follow my projects you may not be aware there is a wood shop. I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it yet but you might have noticed some pieces […]

Alright, after half a dozen burnt out coils it’s time to head in a new direction. The problem is the more current the coil can handle the more the resistance drops. It’s an endless game of chasing my tail. So here’s what were going to do. Bipolar Junction Transistor or […]

Just a quick update on some issues that came up in the final stages of assembly. SSRs… First off the Inkbird solid state relays I was using, bought from amazon, failed. As I’ve mentioned before these are semi-dangerous because they fail closed causing runaway heating. Unfortunately due to the contactor […]

Smelter Monitor Web page

Alright, it’s time to properly implement the Bandsaw controls. The VFD has a number of handy options which are a product of 3 phase power. That means we can futz with the electrical phase frequency in order to use this as an AC electric motor speed controller. First we’re going […]

Alright, it’s time to make our smelter actually do something. After a long night I have the majority of our code, if not all, ready to go and probably buggy with the help of ChatGPT. Lets start with our NodeMCU / Ardunio / ESP8266. We’ll need the arduino IDE set […]

So I have one of those tiny bandsaws you can get at Menards (or home depot or lowes probably) and truthfully I’ve been impressed with it overall. Wood is no sweat, aluminum is ok however steel is out of the question. It just runs too fast, I’ve ruined a couple […]

Part 2 Alright it’s time to build an oven but not just any oven. We have some specific requirements.1. Electric – I don’t want to mess around with acquiring whatever kind of fuel we might use and the sigificant other won’t let me tap into the gas lines, not even […]

In this project we will build a system to catch the water a whole house humidifier normally dumps down the drain. We will also add a 5 gallon tank and an automatic water treatment dispenser so we can reduce the disgusting mess that grows on the water panel and presumably […]