Spring and Springs in Alaska

So we are a few days away from the vernal equinox, AKA spring. Strangely, I have been working on some projects that involve springs. And we have a surprise ending.

First we have the spiffy new handle on the dividing head.

This is a spring loaded plunger that pushes the prong into the dividing head and holds it steady. The plunger is pulled back to go to the next hole on the plate. It took quite a lot of messing around to get it right. I kept getting the spring backwards! I had to change springs several times; my supply of springs is limited. So that is one spring.

Next idea I had was a vertically adjustable Dremel holder. My first try looked like this:

The Dremel is held in the chainsaw attachment, already described elsewhere. This worked but it was very sloppy, so I spring-loaded the screws.

It works a lot better that way. The Dremel tends to lever it because this stuff is all Aluminum form Lowe's. A casting would be much better but I'm not set up for that. Bit too much slop. Have to think about that. As it is it is a hand-held Dremel router.

Well, that's three springs. While I was at it I clamped the thing to my homemade pantograph.

This worked surprisingly well. I realize now I have a pantograph with adjustable ratios, depending on where I clamp it. Bonus. It is nice to have a vertical adjustment. I hand-made a set of templates, seen at left. I am holding everything down with two-faced tape. Not ideal, but it works. I m encouraged. Springs are  wonderful.

Finally, "spring" also means a season of the year. The Vernal Equinox is March 21 or 22 depending on a lot of things. This is an astronomical datum. Alaska has its own ideas:

About 10 cm or 4" snow yesterday. Biggest snow of the year. Of course we were (still are) in the El Nino hotspot. No snow to speak of, until yesterday. A day late and a dollar short. No skiing. But it was nice to have the snow, and a fire welcome. Observe Miss Mocha curled up on her tuffet at the right of the picture. Right out of Currier and Ives.

And today the temperature went way up, +6C or so I do not expect winter wonderland to last very long. Spring, one way or another, is here.

A pantographic interlude, v0.1

The gear cutting business has gotten to me and I have laid it aside for a while, since the concentration required is a bit much. So I have started two new new projects. One is the gear cutter (more later I hope) and the other is Pantograph 0.1.

You will remember (or maybe not) the pantograph from another episode; the label is "pantograph."  It was a crude thing, inspired by Stefan Gotteswinter (look up his channel on YouTube). It was a sub-prototype. It was made of masonite, with expired Dremel tools as pivots. Call it v0.0.

This thing will give you 2:1, 4.1 and one other ratio, something like 1:37:1.
I got that idea from Guy Lautard, "Machinist's Bedside Reader" which you can look up.

I used sharpies for 0.0. But all that would do is paper. I'd like to do metal.
So  it is time for a new version, 0.1.  For this I used steel arms; the pivots are bolts, and just to start I used nuts on the bolts. But there is a new requirement. It has to accept a Dremel tool.

A Dremel tool has a threaded nose that can be attached to other things.  Unfortunately this thread is M19x2, and it is hard to produce such a thread, although if you had a screwcutting lathe you could make your own tap. Fortunately Dremel makes a chainsaw sharpener kit (awful, I tried it) but the adapter works perfectly well, M19x2. So  here is the skeleton of V0.1:

The arms are steel strap except the lower crosspiece which is aluminum. A piece of Al angle supports the chainsaw adapter, the thing on the middle of the aluminum bar. The pivots are now bolts and nuts, although that will change. Here  it is assembled, complete with workholder arrangement. (The crossbars and a couple of wedges). I am trying to engrave a piece of Ally scrap.



There are several problems with this setup. The workholding needs improvement. Maybe threaded inserts and toe clamps. The board is much too short, easily fixed. The worst problem is depth adjustment on the dremel. Too little depth and it won't cut at all. Too much and it digs in and won't cut either. I have slots cut in the angle support but that is cumbersome to adjust. I am pondering this one -- it is not trivial. A screw adjustment would be ideal and then I would have a cross between a mill and a pantograph. I could mill out odd shapes just like Stefan Gotteswinter does. We will see.

A pipe tool and a pantograph

A strange mixture of topics. But bear with me. I got so exicted about using the graver on the Taig that I decided to make something useful on it. The result is a pipe tool. This is the thing us pipe smokers use to tamp down the pipe, clean out the bore, and scrape out the pipe bowl.

The handle was turned on the Taig out of Aluminum. Freehand, with the graver. I am not yet in the brass-turning league, I am working my way up to it. The wire stem cleaner is "music wire" from Lowe's. It says "easily bent for school projects." Hah! Easily bent  by Superman, yes. I had to anneal it to forge the loop. The blade is an ex-hacksaw blade ground to shape and moderately sharpened. There is a slot milled in it, and a brass rivet to hold it all together. It works like a charm. Note the taper at the end of the handle; all by hand. It acts as the tamper. Altogether an extension of the Taig lathe.

The above pic will give you and idea of scale.

So the next thing for this week is that I got all exited about Stefan Gottteswinter's YouTube channel (q.g.) because he has a marvellous precision engraving machine. It is based on the pantograph principle. So what is a panotgraph? It is a device that allows you to reduce, or expand,  a basic pattern in a given ratio. If you are trying to make something very small, it is an advantage to make it twice (or more) times larger and then reduce it via pantograph. So what is a pantograph?

A simple paralleogram. The corners can all pivot. Across the bottom bar are a row of holes,   into which I stick a Sharpie. The midpoint gives me a 2:1 redusction. 1/3 of the way across gives me 3:1. To the right of the midpoint, I get magnification. Not too interested in that.

This is a crude mockup. I am using Sharpies in the holes and tracing the image of a crude letter O on the paper; I did the O freehand. The pin next to the big wood O is the tracer end. The whole thing is a flimsy contraption, built in a few hours, but I got the principle of the thing down with it.

Next thing to do is to rebuild this thing out of metal and adapt it to take a Dremel tool. Then I can do some serious stuff. Stay tuned.