Blogs
Dynamo
As I thought about what my ‘MARVELOUS MACHINE’ would do I decided the steam engine would power an electric generator which would in turn power the next device. With a little research I discovered they were called a DYNAMO when they were invented. On further research I found a photo of one I liked. I did a sketch to visualize how it would fit on a heavy duty bracket and have a gear to drive it. Then it was time to guild the routing files
Airfoils: You Are Doing it Wrong
To be fair, I was at least doing it wrong-ish for many years, or at least, not as right as I could be. Allow me to explain – and yes, I’m dusting off this blog after many years of inactivity. I figured I would get things going again by going back to the very beginning, and pass along some of my updated thinking as it pertains to drawing airfoils in NURBS. In case you haven’t read it, here is my original post on drawing airfoils in NURBS.
Laser Engraving and Precision Board HDU
We've been getting a lot of questions lately about whether or not Precision Board HDU can be laser engraved. It absolutely can! We decided to take a closer look at laser cutters in general and how they interact with our HDU material. Our good friend Jim Dawson from...
Gearing up for fun
We’ve made plenty of projects with gears through the years but this is the first time they will actually move and interact. That meant they had to be accurate without any fudging. A friend sent me a link for a simple gear making program a while back and using it made it easy to create the DXF files for the gears. I made five different sized gears all with the same sized teeth
Almost done
It’s a bit hard to believe but we are at last nearing the end of the first phase of the NEB’s fun World project. We have seven more posts to assemble and sculpt to finish this stage of the project. Through the last months we’ve designed hundreds of CNC files. We’ve cut up more than a hundred sheets of plywood, tons of sheet steel and many sheets of Precision Board
Quick install
I love it when installations are painless and quick – just as we plan. The four signs for the Cultus Lake Boardwalk fell into this category. To install we measured thing up and marked the beams, then walked the signs up two ladders, positioned then and bolted them into place with lag bolts. It took less than five minutes per sign to do the installation.
Flying at the flywheel
The flywheel for the ‘MARVELOUS MACHINE’ was a fun little project. Creating the file took a number of steps but it wasn’t overly difficult. The entire file was designed using EnRoute. The spoke vectors looked a lot like giant tear drops I designed one, then duplicated it and flipped it
Using EnRoute as a design tool
With the bowling alley now almost complete we are ready to move on to the next phase of the NEBs project. That is the Pub area. We had done some preliminary renderings last year. The primary element was the giant still. At that time they were going to dig out a section of the floor to create a lower level and then build a mezzanine level above.
Paint, paint and then paint again!
The four signs for the Cultus Lake Boardwalk are now nearing completion. Each colour of the sign gets a minimum of three coats of paint to ensure a long life and fade resistance. That’s a lot of cutting of the many colours! The ribbit ride sign now only needs one more blend coat of yellow paint on the lettering plus some eyeball details before it is declared done. The three Cultus Lake Boardwalk signs need two more coats of blending on the letters plus three coats of white on the borders. Hopefully tomorrow has enough hours to get the job done