The much delayed vacuum table for the Haas SR-100 is finally completed. The vacuum table is piped to the Travaini TRVM40-200 oil ring vacuum pump via 2" pvc piping. With all the valves closed, vacuum gauge shows ~29" of Hg so the pvc piping seem to be fairly air tight. The next crucial test will be the spoil board test.

What can open source software do for you?

Clockwise from the upper left corner, a chip/oil trap filter for the Haas VF-2SS coolant tank designed with OpenSCAD using IO Rodeo's py2scad openscad file generator. The actual chip filter frame built from lase cut acrylic. Chip filter frame with polyester filter. Chip filter in use.

The culprit behind the broken tap was a simple human error. The wrong tap was used. Instead of using a taper tap, a bottoming tap was used. Originally, drill and tap clearance was an issue because the stock was mounted directly on top of the table. In this second attempt, two Kurt vices were used.

Video of the drilling and tapping operation.

After 8 yeas of use, the 35W laser cartridge on the ULS M300 laser engraver finally ran out of steam. The symptom was the rapid lose of laser power after a couple minute of vector cutting. Luckily, the fix was a simple swapping of the laser cartridge.

Clockwise from the upper left hand corner. The arrival of the laser cartridge. The laser cartridge. The back of the laser engrave with the old laser cartridge removed. Installation of the new laser cartridge. No tools were needed and the whole process too less than 5 minutes.

A short video on the test cutting with the new laser cartridge.

Looking for an open source 3d cad solutions? IO Rodeo designed their water channel project using openscad and their py2scad python scripting plugin for openscad. Tux-Lab has the much simpler task of just machining a few parts. One of them was the pillow block mount.

The gcode was fairly simple and consist of three operations. Lesson learned was that a properl sized drill will be faster than using an endmill to mill the hole to size.

True to the hackerspace ethos, instead of buying one, Null Space Lab is building a laser cutter. Tasked with some of the machining, the journey begins. The first parts to be machined are the two linear rail mounts.

Step 1 - Tooling from Maritool, one of the best place to find US made tools at a great price.

Step 2 - Cut stock to size. . . .

Step 3 - Machine fixture for linear rail mounts.

Step 4 - Clamp stock to top of fixture and machine the counter sink holes.

Step 5 - Use the counter sink holes to fasten stock to fixture for drilling, tapping, and profiling. . . but forward progress stopped by two consecutive broken taps. . . to be continued. . .

tcp-imp was the planned indigenous manufacturing arm of TheCuriousPenguin, which itself is an experiment in using open source software to build a fiscally and intellectually transparent online retail company that gives back to other open source projects.

Idealistically, open source software will serve as a social-economical equalizer that promotes the sharing of knowledge, and competition in a fiscally and intellectually transparent environment will hopefully lead to a richer and freer capitalistic society for all, rather the alternate narratives being pushed by the various nouveau authoritarian capitalists in red straitjacket.

Tux-Lab is the open source hackerspace that has not materialized due to budgetary constraints. However, as more and more open source software are used by tcp-imp for its manufacturing process, the indigenous manufacturing project has slowly morphed into tux-lab, an open source laboratory.

Last week a simple machining project was completed for IORodeo. That project was drawn by IORodeo using open source cad, OpenSCAD, and machined with manually written gcode. This week, a new project was started to help build parts for NullSpaceLab's laser cutter.

As always, Liberty, Equality, & Justice for ALL !!!

Finally, Haas SR-100 cnc router is up and running. The machine was manufactured in September 2009, installed in November 2009, setup by Haas in August 2010, and finally up and running in April 2011. It took a long while, but at last, it's up and running. . . well, the vacuum table is um. . . Anyway, the SR-100 is up and running.

Because the SR-100 will be fed a steady diet of wood and foam board, a dust collector is a must. The Oneida V-3000 cyclone dust collector arrived in late January 2010. The assembly process was fairly straight forward.

The first task was to make a new MDF table. It's a simple process involving counter boring 45 screw holes. The SR-100 and V3000 combination was perfect, but the same cannot be said for the programmer. . .

With the installation of the Royal 5C Pneumatic Collet Closer, the Haas TL2 cnc tool room lathe with the optional 3500rpm spindle is officially operational. The installation of the collet closer was fairly straight forward. The hardest part was removing the existing 8" 3 Jaw chuck.

Boxes from Royal Products arrives.


Royal pneumatic closer installed, with foot pedal actuator.


Close up of the pneumatic cylinder. The idea for the collet closer stabilizer was from Mark Hockett on cnczone.com.


Close up of the 5c collet Closer.

Almost Ready. . .