Making a Guitar Go to Eleven, The Hard Way
At the end of the day, all it takes to make a guitar go to eleven is a new knob. Making the knob is another thing — that takes a …read more Continue reading Making a Guitar Go to Eleven, The Hard Way
Category Archives: spline
Tactical Build Makes Machining Splined Shaft a Snap
Quick, what’s 360 divided by 23? It’s easy enough to get the answer, of course, but if you need to machine a feature every 15.652 degrees around a shaft, how …read more Continue reading Tactical Build Makes Machining Splined Shaft a Snap
Make Your Own Pot and Encoder Knobs, Without Reinventing Them
Rotary potentiometers, switches, and encoders all share a basic design: adjustment is done via a shaft onto which a knob is attached, and knobs are sold separately. That doesn’t mean …read more Continue reading Make Your Own Pot and Encoder Knobs, Without Reinventing Them
3D Printed Strain-Wave Gearbox Turns Up the Torque
3D printers are good for a lot of things, but making parts for power transmission doesn’t seem to be one of them. Oh sure, some light-duty gears and timing belt …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Strain-Wave Gearbox Turns Up the Torque
Turn Your Lathe into a Shaper
Ingenuity is the name of the game with manual machine tools. You often have to get creative to use the tools you have to create the part you want. That’s exactly what happened when [John] needed to cut internal splines and keyways using his lathe.
Lathes are usually used to turn metal, but internal keyways and splines are operations often performed with a broach. An older tool called a shaper would be perfect here, but shapers are relatively rare these days — or are they? There are many examples of shaper attachments for lathes. These are human-powered devices that scrape …read more
Printed Adapter Teaches an Old Ninja New Tricks
Do you like change for the sake of change? Are you incapable of leaving something in a known and working state, and would rather fiddle endlessly with it? Are you unconcerned about introducing arbitrary compatibility issues into your seemingly straight-forward product line? If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, have we got the job for you! You can become a product engineer, and spend your days confounding customers who labor under the unrealistic expectation that a product they purchased in the past would still work with seemingly identical accessories offered by the same company a few years down …read more
Continue reading Printed Adapter Teaches an Old Ninja New Tricks