Tag: diy

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Spray Booth Reclaimed!

Spray Booth

Spray Booth

I picked up an Artograph 1520 Spray Booth from the Hack Rack at Milwaukee Makerspace. Well, just the base of one, but the rest of the parts are fairly easy to DIY, so I did.

This spray booth lists for about $250 from various places, and if you use the 3 stage filter system you’ve got to get replacements at some point, and those aren’t cheap either. I don’t quite have a carbon-impregnated polyester filter for the third stage, and I still haven’t figured out the first stage pre-filter, but I grabbed one of my favorites, the super-cheap Ace Hardware 30 day furnace filter. The 20x25x1 is about $1.29 so even if I replace them pretty often, it’ll still be pretty darn cheap.

Ace Filter

I use the larger Ace filters in my big spray painting booth, and with a lot of painting I can still go weeks before I replace one. Those are a bit larger, but they’re still under $2.00 each. I did need to cut the 20x25x1 down just a bit to fit in the 1520, but only in one dimension, so that’s not too bad. Scissors is all you need to cut it. And as for the cardboard hood (which you can see is recycled from a Pelican case) I ended up tracing the one we have at work. (Yup, same model, it’s a popular one. I didn’t even bother with the slots and tabs for the hood, I just used some gaff tape to secure the edges together.

I’ll probably use the booth as our spray glue booth, as the larger spray booth is already doing great for spray paint, and I’d prefer not to mix those two mediums if possible.

So yeah, a bit of cardboard, gaff tape, a furnace filter, and a little bit of time, and I’ve got an excellent reconditioned Artograph 1520 Spray Booth.

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Scrabble Coasters

Laser-etched coasters

I finally finished these Scrabble coasters I’ve been working on forever. There were so many issues with this project, I’m calling these beta and plan to completely redo them. This is all fine though, as I spent some time this weekend explaining to the kids that screwing up and doing things wrong is all part of learning. Fail faster and all that. I’m pretty sure that the next version of these coasters will not have all the problems that this version had.

Laser-cut coasters

So what were the problems? Well, for one thing, I’ve really got to remember to sand the wood first! Yeah, like, before I etch it. Not a huge deal, but I think they’d look better if I had sanded first. As for the backing, I first thought about using cork, but decided against it but then I had to use cork to cover up the mistake on the back of using the wrong wood stain. The cork was not easy to cut, and there are some rough edges. I used a lot of X-ACTO blades in the process, but I think this cork may have been aged a bit too long. As for the wood stain, the wrong stain nearly torpedoed this project. Lesson learned? Test the stain on scrap wood. Besides all that, I think they turned out pretty good.

Oh, while I was using the laser cutter at Milwaukee Makerspace Shane commented that the letters looked a little rough. I had to explain that I didn’t just type up the letters in CorelDraw, I actually scanned real Scrabble tiles, as I wanted these to be authentic replicas, only much larger. I probably didn’t get the color quite right, but again, I’d like to redo the whole project. A deeper/darker etch may be in order next time, and I’ve got another idea for the backing/feet.

Glass on coaster

But do they work? Yes! Surprisingly enough, the glass did not tip over or go flying off the coaster, though honestly I think gravity had a lot more to do with it than my skills at making things. Still, I’ll count it as a success. :)

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MKE3DP – 3D Printer Fans Unite!

MKE3DP

As you may know, I finished my RepRap recently. But here’s the thing, you never really finish a RepRap. It’s a beast in need of endless tweaking. So yeah, it’s a never-ending project (if you want it to be) and I’m okay with that. I mean, once you get to the point that it works, you can start using it to upgrade itself. How many tools can do that!?

Of course you can actually make useful things, functional things, or just pretty things. There’s a lot a 3D Printer can do. I’ve only been at it for less than a year and I’ve still got a lot to learn.

So anyway, yeah, I’m really enjoying this 3D Printing stuff… so I figured, why not share it with others? So join us for the first Milwaukee 3D Printing Meetup! We’ll be meeting on Sunday, July 1st, 2012 at 1:00pm. We won’t be at our space because we’ve partnered with our friends at UWM for this one! Show up at UWM’s Kenilworth Square East Building, 3rd Floor; Room 368 on 1925 E. Kenilworth Place.

If you’ve got a 3D Printer, bring it, or just show up and learn about them. If things go well and there’s interest, maybe we’ll turn it into a regularly scheduled meeting.

(More info? It’s also on the Milwaukee Makerspace site and you can RSVP on Facebook if you want to see who else will be there.)

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iPhone Tripod Mount

iPhone Tripod Mount

Since the camera on the iPhone 4S is so good, more than one person has thought about mounting the iPhone on a tripod.

In fact, some guys did a Kickstarter campaign and got over $137,417 for the idea! And a bunch of other people designed things you could make on your 3D Printer to do the job.

The Glif

The problem with the Glif and most of these other phone holders is that they are designed to work with an uncased iPhone, and I tend to leave mine in the case all the time. I use an OtterBox case (It’s this one.) It’s grippy and rubbery, and since I wanted a tripod mount that would work with the case, I made my own. (Here’s a post that mentions an early version.)

iPhone Tripod Mount

This mount would probably work with almost any phone that uses a rubbery case, since it uses the grip of the rubber to its advantage to stay in place. You just gently tighten the wing nuts to hold the phone in place. There are nuts under the top piece of wood to prevent you from over-tightening.

iPhone Tripod Mount

Yeah, it’s basically two pieces of wood, two bolts, a few washers, nuts, and wing nuts. I may consider printing some knobs like I did here to replace the wing nuts. (And yeah, you’ll notice it’s the same screw method I used for my DIY Mouthpiece Puller.)

iPhone Tripod Mount

The bottom piece of wood has two small pilot holes to accommodate the two buttons on the side of the iPhone, so the buttons do not get depressed when in the mount.

iPhone Tripod Mount

The other tricky thing is how I mount the tripod plate to the bottom. I ended up getting a nut coupler, and then drilling a hole into the bottom piece of wood, and pretty much hammering in the nut coupler. It was too long so I had to hack saw it off to be flush with the bottom. Not pretty, but it does work.

Now that I’ve got this done, I should probably go back and do those test shots comparing the iPhone 4S camera to other cameras. :)

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DIY Cell Phone

Laser-cut plywood and veneer case

How much do I love this DIY cell phone? Quite a bit! I’m not trading in my iPhone for this (yet) but I love the idea of being able to order parts from SparkFun and Adafruit and dropping in a SIM card and having a mobile phone for under $200.

I can also imagine that such hardware could be incorporated into various projects where voice or text communication could come in handy. I know that some folks attach phones to balloons or incorporate them into other remote monitoring systems… so what if you could extend this simple DIY phone hardware to be exactly what you want to fit your project?

I also love many of the other projects I’ve seen from the High-Low Tech group at MIT. (If only I could have met some of the people involved with the group while I was at MIT last month!)