If you really like to make things and you are going to be proposing sometime in the future, why not use your skills of making things to craft a one of a kind engagement ring? The prospect of making an engagement ring seems daunting, and the lack of information on the subject can be a big deterrent. Hopefully this article will help shed some light on the subject; it is a lot easier to do than you might think! You can check out the complete build of my ring here.
For the past week my missing roll of kapton tape has been the bane of my existence, preventing me from trying out the new extruder that I built for my RepRap. Today all of that changed when I found the roll tucked away in a toolbox full of spare RepRap parts I forgot I had underneath my bed. This past week has reminded me why I don’t organize things. Whenever I say I am going to organize my stuff, I’m basically saying “I’m going to go hide all my stuff in places where I’ll never be able to find it!” Anyhow, I’ll be assembling the RepRap today and hopefully taking it for a test drive this afternoon evening. Stay tuned!
*Update* I have since tested the extruder – it works very nicely when I’m not actually printing. There seems to be a problem with the host preventing the extruder from extruding during a print. I’m out of time for now but I will try to sort it out ASAP.
I have been building a RepRap in my spare time from instructions you will find if you follow the link. The instructions detail an extrusion mechanism which uses a direct drive from a stepper motor. It turns out that no matter what I do I cannot get enough torque to operate the RepRap in that configuration. I made a quick fix out of erector set gears, but it was bulky and didn’t perform very well.
With an insane amount of work and school leading up to Christmas, and having invested about 20 extra hours just trying to get it to work I had to put the RepRap project on hold. Fortunately I had some free time this past week so I designed and machined a new extruder which utilized some old brass worm gears I had lying around (actually they were extremely old – off some 50+ year old model trains I have, I choose not to think about their potential value). The bad news is that I had to take the heater off to make the upgrades and to reinstall the heater I will be needing some kapton tape – which I seemed to have misplaced. I’m looking hard though! I will give an update once I get it working. I’ll also post the plans – I don’t know how useful they will be though, as I used what is most likely non standard gears. The design borrows its geometry liberally from a design I saw once here.
*Update* I have since tested the extruder – it works very nicely when I’m not actually printing. There seems to be a problem with the host preventing the extruder from extruding during a print. I’m out of time for now but I will try to sort it out ASAP.
You might have noticed some changes to the site and blog yesterday/today. I decided that I was tired of the crummy looking pages I had before, especially the homepage with the tantalizing scrolling images advertising projects that couldn’t be clicked. So dark blues and greys are the new site colors. Let me know if you find any dead links or if something doesn’t seem to work properly – I’ll fix it! If you haven’t ever seen the site that this blog belongs to, its definitely worth a look. Check it out here.
PS – If you don’t understand my silly picture, it represents my old website a bland old white square being revamped into a much better, much more attractive cube. Micro-evolution at its finest.
