Collaborate Disseminate
Building a good quality machine shop may seem to present a chicken-and-egg problem, at least for anyone not willing to mortgage their home for the money needed to buy all …read more Continue reading Beginning the Machine Shop Journey with a DIY CNC
If you’ve taken a physics class, you’ve doubtless heard tales of mythical beasts like the massless string, the frictionless bearing, and the perfect sphere. And if you’re designing something new, …read more Continue reading The Devil is in the Details
There are at least two ways of making parts that fit together exactly. The first way is the Cartesian way, and the machinists way. Imagine that you could specify the …read more Continue reading Machinist’s Accuracy vs. Woodworker’s Precision
We won’t pretend to fully grok everything going on with this open-source 8.5-digit voltmeter that [Marco Reps] built. After all, the design came from the wizards at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home to the Large Hadron Collider …read more
He was either the smallest person who has ever lived, by an order of magnitude, or the heaviest person ever known, by two of them. Continue reading The massive coronavirus IT blunder with a funny side
CNC machines made from wood and 3D-printed parts may be popular, but they aren’t always practical from a precision and repeatability standpoint. This is especially true as the machines are scaled up in size, where the compliance of their components starts to really add up. But can those issues be …read more
Continue reading Enormous CNC Router Uses Clever Tricks to Improve Performance
Join us on Wednesday, December 2nd at noon Pacific for the Precision Optics Hack Chat with Jeroen Vleggaar!
We sometimes take for granted one of the foundational elements of our technological world: optics. There are high-quality lenses, mirrors, filters, and other precision optical components in just about everything these days, …read more
Continue reading Precision Optics Hack Chat with Jeroen Vleggaar of Huygens Optics
I admit: a few years of prototyping without easy machine shop access really whets my tastebuds for turning metal chips. But all that time spent away from proper machine tools has also pushed me to re-imagine part catalogs, something I see almost every day. Without any precision metalworking tools handy, …read more
Continue reading The B-Sides: Curious Uses of Off-the-Shelf Parts
There is something to be said for brute force or trial-and-error approaches to problems, especially when finding a solution has an empirical element to it. [Tommy] perceived that to be the case when needing to design and 3D print servo horns that would fit factory servos as closely as possible, …read more
Continue reading Finding Perfect Part Fits with the Goldilocks Approach (and OpenSCAD)
For any sort of precision machine, precision adjustability is required. For the hacker this usually involves an adjustment screw, where the accuracy is determined by the thread pitch. This was not good enough for [Mark Rehorst] who wanted adjustment down to 10μm for his 3D printer’s optical end-stop, so …read more
Continue reading Screwy Math For Super Fine Adjustments: Differential Screws