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« on: June 22, 2008, 05:22:29 PM »
Rather than clog up tweakie's wood routing thread with my garbage, I thought I'd start a new one for some of the things I've been working on.
The first one is a vac jig I just completed for engraving some parts
that I make. As you can see it is a basic vac pump that has a filter,
vac gage and connects via the coil hose to a ball valve which is
connected to the jig I've made. The jig consists of a hollowed out
base with an o-ring groove and o-ring to seal to the top plate when
installed.
The top plate has a nesting cavity with it's own o-ring to hold the
parts I make (triangle with holes) for engraving. This allows a nice
quick change from one part to the next. What's nice about this setup
is the fact that I can make more top plates and interchange them from
one style of part to the next via dowel pins for location each top
plate.
I'm so please with the way this works!
The next "toy" is the LED Spindle light. I tore apart an outdoor LED
low voltage lighting lamp ($3.05 on clearance at Lowes!) that has 6
superbright LEDs.
In the first pic you can see the roll of tape and how many shadows
are on the inside and this gets even worse when you get the headstock
down low with a cutter inside and you're trying to move in on a
pocket or a similar situation.
I've seen the LED rings that others made for their X3 mills and
thought that would be perfect for me but I'd have to come up with a
different mounting idea as there's no room under the headstock for
something like this. So a sort of "collar" would have to do. It's
made from black acetal 375 thick and the pocket depth on mine is .250
but needless to say, feel free to modify it any way you'd like.
Sorry I didn't get any pics of the inside of the housing inside but
when you see the dxf for it , you'll get the jist of the pocketing for the wires. As for
led hole locations, those are totally up to you and the cover cap can
be made using the same outside profile as the base. For the wiring, I
used a 12 volt wall wart transfomer that is plugged into my main
outlet center and turns on when I power everything up. You could add
a inline rotary switch if you desire though.
Just thought I'd pass this along as it's a quick project that really
helps out, just don't make these up and sell them on ebay- lol!!!
Note, I now see that someone is selling something just like this (
but more professional looking lol!!!) but the 2 lights in the front
would not be adequate enough as I've palyed with light location for a
bit to get it evenly spaced. Since my lights are all around the
spindle, it spreads the light out so you have light in the back as
well without ANY shadows.
Hope you enjoyed these!
Dave-
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