Printable View
so rather than making a couple pf hundred crowns on the nook/touchpad trade i've lost a couple of hundred. all told i think it was a good trade, although i am definitely more fond of 7" and widescreen for all purposes save reading pdfs and watching videos. webos is beautiful but not as customisable as android. android is working great so far, no obvious signs of alphaness :D writing is definitely less fun on squarish tablets
And this gives me hope:
https://plus.google.com/103222809770...ts/dr6unHQcHEA
I've been given two tickets to Wembley to see the Olympics. This will be my first time seeing Wembley and fingers crossed - a party atmosphere. :)
Spotify now working :D
Lucky fucker!Quote:
Originally Posted by Lor
Not been to the new wembley yet. What event did you get?
The only olympic event we got out of those we went for was rowing, down in Eton.
A couple things about this weekend made it great. Kathy Griffin performed Saturday evening, and I thought I wasn't going to get to go (it sold out). Surprise! My boyfriend sprung out of nowhere and snagged some really great seats. Then tonight, the first new Abfab episode premiered on BBC America, and it was very amusing. It's so strange how they got all of the cast back and none of them seem to have aged a day! Well, except for the father. He looks a bit older, but not much. Anyway, A+.
Ah shit I forgot about the new AbFab episode. :( I enjoyed watching the marathon on last weekend; hadn't seen it in forever!
Men's football on the 1st August :).Quote:
Originally Posted by Timbuk2
Apparently, Refused is back together and playing at Coachella. They'd better also play at Groezrock - it's one of my favourite bands and I wouldlove to see them live :D
Oh, and apparently At the Drive-In are back together, too :D
But what if they're refused :cry:Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
Happiest:
http://i43.tinypic.com/nlwxfm.jpg
Windows, Linux, whatever, the ability to put two useful windows side-by-side on a large screen makes up for many shortcomings. On the right, a pretty accessible free online book by a brill ophthalmologist. On the left, the web interface for studydroid, one of my favourite android apps. Sometimes I write, and sometimes I just copy and paste. It's one of the most effective ways I know to study for an exam :o
When that popped up in Windows 7, I never realized how much easier that made mutli-tasking. Not having it at work is one of my current main complaints.
Ronald and I were shopping today at the Cevahir Mall in Istanbul. When we entered Polo Garage I noticed a sign telling that Turkcell had a special offer. As we see those all the time around here I didn't pay too much notice to it. Then Ronald saw a pair of pants he liked which was marked down from TL 150 to.. strangely two separate prices. One being TL 89 and the other TL 70. That would mean a difference of about $10.
While he was trying them on I went back to the enterence to check what I suspected; the lower of the two prices was for Turkcell customers who had a action code. I registered for the campaign with a free sms. Then obtained the password with a second message that cost me 25 cents. After that, Ronald could buy the pants for the lower price of TL70 :D
Found an 8 foot 6 lane Hot Wheels track, and their new video camera car, on Target clearance for a total price just under $35. :D:up:
The first run:
You need just a tad more light for that :)
Yeah, the fluorescent tubes in the playroom work a lot better.
Oooh! I want a hotwheels camera car!
I am so happy about CAD/CAM and bringing it into my life. I never would have agreed to do this job without it. If I did agree to do it, it would have been and absolute and painful nightmare. This was still more challenging than I anticipated, but I am so pleased with the final product. This is the only job I did today.
Wax Model (CNC Milled) and Cast Piece:
http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/d...ler/378132.jpg
Finished:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7035/6...5c203f5b_o.jpg
Detail:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7144/6...a948cd1e_o.jpg
There are 124 tiny half point (1.1-1.2mm) diamonds all over this bad boy.
Lolli so fucking told me so!
3D modeling and printing is an amazing tool of the future (and now really, its just going to get more amazing as we can print more things, and it becomes cheaper to print. The future debate about downloading and printing a car is going to be hilarious as well). Also, did you purchase your own CNC mill? If so how much for one of those?
Wax printing for jewelry is wrought with issues. First, the resins they use don't burn out clean, and require special high temperature investment, and longer burnout times, with fucks with timing of standard wax burnout. Second, there is a high shrink rate that changes the thicker the model is. This matters when setting stones girdle to girdle. Third, grow lines. Resolution of the print is getting better, but you stil have to over model to account for the clean up loss. This is all workable, just a lot to think about when designing.
Milling uses standard wax, so nothing about my process has to change. Milling produces some fantastic surface finish that can go from casting to polishing without prefinishing. Milling is much faster! The biggest drawback for a 4-axis mill, like mine, is NO undercuts. This is a big design challenge. The good thing is, the wax can be carved by hand so hollowing out the underside of a ring is fast and easy.
As far as modeling, growers require water tight models. This can cause headaches when you can't find and get naked edges and holes patched. While milling only looks at surfaces, I don't have to Boolean all my prongs and surfaces or worry about naked edges and other sloppy modeling. ;)
The high end, high resolution resin printers go for about $40k.
Mills are cheaper. The mill sold by the company that made Matrix goes for $24k. It is completely automated and integrated toolpathing into the software. But I heard a lot of people having issues with calibration not holding, and sloppy tolerances. Basically lots of problems, and no advanced control of toolpathing.
My mill is a MiniTech and was only $14k. I did have to buy toolpathing software DeskProto, which i have to learn, but it doesn't look toooo complicated. Also, the rotary chuck is made by Sherline, and I can work on prepping something on my Sherline lathe, and swap the chucks, and the lathed piece remains zeroed out on the mill!
I have a really nice, and really good jeweler in eastern PA, guiding me. He's been amazingly helpful, and has helped show me things with the software.
I don't know about growing a car, but there are growers you can get for like $1200, and it is bringing rapid model and sculpture making to an affordable hobbyist consumer level, which I think is really cool!
Are there mills that resolve this issue, because it seems trivial to think of a machine that will carve/mill all that it can using its current setup, then rotate the object so it can finish the rest, while also giving it a preliminary scan to compare it to what should exist to know if its in the right orientation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bitter Jeweler
This is something that has to be considered with standard 3D modeling for 3D printing, as a polygon being a 2D shape has no thickness, thus if the 3D object you've made is not water tight, it for all intents and purposes has no thickness as well.Quote:
As far as modeling, growers require water tight models. This can cause headaches when you can't find and get naked edges and holes patched. While milling only looks at surfaces, I don't have to Boolean all my prongs and surfaces or worry about naked edges and other sloppy modeling. ;)
So...until I'm churning out thousands of things, or things worth thousands of dollars, this isn't going to be a good investment for me. I guess this is why they make you email/mail them for a quote, since this seems like a "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." kind of thing. Looks like I'll have to price out 3rd party prints/mills.Quote:
The high end, high resolution resin printers go for about $40k.
Mills are cheaper. The mill sold by the company that made Matrix goes for $24k. It is completely automated and integrated toolpathing into the software. But I heard a lot of people having issues with calibration not holding, and sloppy tolerances. Basically lots of problems, and no advanced control of toolpathing.
My mill is a MiniTech and was only $14k. I did have to buy toolpathing software DeskProto, which i have to learn, but it doesn't look toooo complicated. Also, the rotary chuck is made by Sherline, and I can work on prepping something on my Sherline lathe, and swap the chucks, and the lathed piece remains zeroed out on the mill!
Does the machine itself come with separate software just for it besides the jewelry design software you used? Having no experience with this, I just assumed it worked like a regular home printer did, where if you had the right driver installed on whatever computer is hooked up to it, and fed it the right file type (CAD or STL I'm assuming), the machine would work it out.Quote:
I have a really nice, and really good jeweler in eastern PA, guiding me. He's been amazingly helpful, and has helped show me things with the software.
Car would be difficult, and would have to be printed at an automatic factory (different parts would be printed/milled/sintered on their own and then assembled), and likely be insanely more expensive than a standard car. However I look forward to how cheap this technology will be in the coming years.Quote:
I don't know about growing a car, but there are growers you can get for like $1200, and it is bringing rapid model and sculpture making to an affordable hobbyist consumer level, which I think is really cool!
Yes, a 5-axis mill greatly increases abilities, but there are still drawbacks, like I still couldn't hollow out a ring, because the hub that holds the ring is in the way. There are work arounds. Typically what my models will require is called a 2 sided flip, and rotation. The ring is cut out of a block of wax from one side, then the other, cutting a hub in the finger hole. Then you take that out and mount it to a support on the rotating A-axis and mill around the outside of the ring. If I have to do something hollow, I could do just a 2 sided flip where the model is spit in half, and I can superglue them together before casting. But you have to be uber precise whe you split across settings, like the above ring, that fit stones a millimeter wide. I've also done models where the top, is seperate from the ring base.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
So yeah, you just have to think about how the item you are designing can be milled, in various ways, which will guide your model, and how you mill it. So, again, like the ring above, all the prongs on the side curves were milling parallel to the y-axis. They aren't perpendicular to the curve. But for setting purposes, you ultimately don't know that. It creates a little setting challenge, but you just work with it.
Which ever rapid prototyping method you choose, there are limitations, benefits, and drawback. You basically decide how it will be prototyped, and model towards that end.
Right. Which is why milling is cool, because it sees surfaces, and they don't even have to be connected. I didn't know this at first, and was trying to boolean all my models. I told the guy that currently does my milling (till I get mine going) about a model that I spent an hour trying to fix a naked edge. He laughed, and said that doesn't matter here.Quote:
This is something that has to be considered with standard 3D modeling for 3D printing, as a polygon being a 2D shape has no thickness, thus if the 3D object you've made is not water tight, it for all intents and purposes has no thickness as well.
I think they make you call so they can rope you in. You know, they ARE salespeople after all. I do hate that they don't list prices, even when you CAN afford it. They just don't want you shopping around, and that sucks. I just found jewelers that had various systems and asked them. Made my decision off price and reliability. I was willing to go for the $24k Mill, till I heard all the complaints, in person and on forums. I heard repeatedly that once you set/calibrate the MiniTech, you won't ever have to touch it again. Whereas the more expensive machine, I watched on the forums how often issues with axis's (?) losing zero, and frequent calibration, and shimming and axis, etc...Quote:
So...until I'm churning out thousands of things, or things worth thousands of dollars, this isn't going to be a good investment for me. I guess this is why they make you email/mail them for a quote, since this seems like a "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." kind of thing. Looks like I'll have to price out 3rd party prints/mills.
As far as when to buy? Well, it's not really thousands of parts...I do 8-15+ wax carvings a moth. At $45-$60 a model, that turned out to be a minimum monthly payment for the MiniTech over three years. I'll pay it off in a year. But thats where you make your decision. When you are throwing your money away when you could eventually keep that money in house. Look at it this way. I charge a minimum of $125 for a wax carving, it goes up with complexity. I still charge my customers that PLUS the $45-$60 I am paying someone else. It takes me half the time to model as it did to hand carve. The milled pieces take half the time to set, yet I still charge what it would take to do by hand. This mill will be raking in the dough, and giving me more free time. So no, it's not thousands of pieces, or things that are thousands of dollars. I only made $600 for that ring above, after taking material cost out.
The jewelery software is a plugin for Rhino 3D. Gemvision developed this plug in specifically for jewelers, and created tools to make complex tasks easier, like laying out stones on a surface, and then automatically adding the prongs and stuff.Quote:
Does the machine itself come with separate software just for it besides the jewelry design software you used? Having no experience with this, I just assumed it worked like a regular home printer did, where if you had the right driver installed on whatever computer is hooked up to it, and fed it the right file type (CAD or STL I'm assuming), the machine would work it out.
The mill comes with a controller that runs Mach3 software. Or rather the Mach3 software on the PC translates tool paths into machine code sent to the controller of the mill. DeskProto is software that you create toolpaths in, to export to Mach3 (DeskProto supports all kinds of mills and controller software), and like installing a printer, you have to tell it what you have, so it outputs correctly. So, 3D Software ---> Model ---> Tool Path Software ---> Tool Path ---> Controller software ---> Mill ---> FinishedModel :)
DeskProto has cheap hobbyist licesnes, and a free trial, and whatever 3D software you have can export models to it, if you just want to play around.
http://www.deskproto.com/support/videos.htm Lot's of videos here!
It's already cheap if you don't require precision modeling. How long do you think it will take for the precision machines to come down to an affordable price? When they do, I wonder what the NEW rapid prototyping machines will be doing!!! It will have to be amazing!Quote:
I look forward to how cheap this technology will be in the coming years.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ian/yesyes.pngQuote:
Dear Dr *******
We are delighted to accept your manuscript "*******" in Nature. Thank you for choosing to
publish your interesting work with us.
(I'm second author)
Awesome!
I have my mom, and both of Brandy's brides maids agreeing that the Imperial Match would be a perfect song to walk down the aisle to.
They even want to carry light sabers instead of flowers.
Maybe this wedding won't be so bad...
Congrats! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Nessus
You were published in Nature Ness? :eek:
That's superb.
Congratulations! You must be chuffed to friggin' bits!
:haha:Quote:
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
That's .... quite something. I like. :up:
Reading about Bitter's CAD/CAM success is making me happy, I am genuinely happy for you. :up: As much as I love the "old fashioned" skills of creating something yourself you can't help but love what can be done with CNC machining.
Ironically I have had a very challenging couple of months which finally resulted in some personal triumphs (after considerable tribulations) and I've been busting to tell people but a confidentiality contract severely limits what I can say!
Fuck it though I have to let get some of this out somewhere, it might as well be here in the world forgotten...
I have been through an exhaustive and stressful process of developing a new product which was commissioned by a powerful organisation headed by an individual I will refer to as Barbossa, as for the product I cannot tell you what it is though you may end up guessing - I will refer to the finished products as "Roy's" since this is the nickname I gave them early on in the ordeal.
So, we had to cast hundreds of these "Roy's" within a few months (the deadline was not negotiable) and a very talented sculptor was the creator of the final Roy design (the sculptor was guided by Barbossa's brief outline of what he wanted) and this particular sculptor really took on the responsibility for something quite daunting that tested the mettle of everyone involved - it would be fair to say he bit off more than he could chew.
The tooling we manufactured involved 3D laser scanning of the original sculpture, 3D printing of a "pattern" for prototyping (green-sand casting) which then resulted in some slight design changes (this was a delay we could do without). Finally everyone signed off on the "winning" design and we very quickly set about manufacturing the tooling (for die-casting) and in no time we began production - only to hit a massive (almost fatal) flaw in the process, which had myself & the sculptor at a very real risk of being torn apart by Barbossa and his henchman (lawyers).
I am the manufacturer of the casting but the sculptor chose to use a Toolmaker of his own choice and due to the number of chiefs on the project (in different States & Countries no less) I was not given the opportunity to put forward my opinion on what might go wrong (we can't all be fucking blind optimists!) and before I knew it I was looking at the finished die with a sinking feeling - I could see immediately they had put the in-gates and risers in the wrong places.
Too late, the tooling had been made at great expense (on a much bigger CNC machine to Bitters) and could not be remade, but it could be modified if necessary and it would prove very necessary. On the face of it, the problem we had with our castings was this: They were the right size and shape but they looked crap! The surface finish was not good enough, there was a rash of porosity on one side and ugly laminations (folds in the metal) on the other side. We had tried moving the in-gates and risers (Basically this is how the metal gets into the cavity and feeds molten metal into the casting as it cools) but the real problem was not where we fed the metal into the cavity, it was the shape of the damn product! It had too many dimensional changes (from thick sections to thin sections and back again) and very limited options for where we could get the metal into the cavity. We had modified the design of the tooling 3 times and got closer to achieving success each time but it still eluded us and we were about to run out of time - we couldn't give up...
I was literally lying awake in bed at 3am on a Tuesday night and this nagging idea had been bouncing around the outer edges of my thoughts and it finally presented itself centre stage in my sleep deprived mind - it was obvious what I had to do to fix this thing and get back on track.
The solution? A filter!
The real problem had not been just the shape of the cavity but the turbulence in the molten metal as it flowed through the thinner sections of the casting causing it to "squirt" and thereby draw in gasses which caused the porosity, the thicker sections then stayed molten for longer and caused the appearance of laminations. By using a simple silicon carbide ceramic foam filter (these are used in sand casting but to my knowledge this is the first time they've been used in a permanent mold or Die-cast design) we were able to slow the flow of metal to a more manageable rate without chilling too soon and EUREKA!
Mr Barbossa has his shiny minions, Mr Sculptor has his fame and I have less hair, bags under my eyes and a nice warm feeling deep down inside rather than that cold knotted ache I had when things were looking grim a few weeks back.
Happy :D
Nice :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Nessus
Congratulations. What's the article about? (If answering that does not give away too much personal details, of course!)Quote:
Originally Posted by Nessus