What has BobM been up to?

[BobM]

Hey all!

I haven’t been very active either on the forum or at the bench. I have a kit for the Hover SIG...

SQUIRREL



Um... yeah... easily distracted....

Where was I? Oh yeah, the Hover SIG... Well, my kit arrived, but then Christmas hit and this showed up under the tree:



Yep, new hobby. Or maybe just a new dimension to old hobbies. Needless to say, it’s been a learning curve and I’ve been doing a lot of printing the last few weeks. Some failures, but really lots of success! I have a lot of experience with 3D modeling, my day job is actually writing a specialized CAD program for designing optical systems. So the software and design process is in my wheelhouse, but turning that into a real physical object has been an amazing experience.

My first “project” was to design a mounting panel/bracket for a couple of radio scanners for my sons pickup. This required measuring the radios and panel opening in order to build an appropriate model. It took several test prints of portions of the design and testing the fit before I made a final print. I don’t have pictures of the final panel, but here are a couple photo of tests I did to get the dimensions of the mount correct:



And this is fitting the mount to one of the radios:



That was a fun project and it turned out great, at least I haven’t heard otherwise!

Next was to tackle a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, organizing my paints! I searched several 3D printing websites (Thingiverse, etc) for something to just print. I found a few things that were close to what I was looking for, but I wasn’t real happy with any of them. I figured I could do better but use some of the designs for inspiration. So I came up with this:



What I like about this design is that is all snap together and thus all of the shelves are interchangeable. I currently have shelves for Tamiya 23ml, Tamiya 10ml and Vallejo 17ml bottles. Of course any other bottles that are roughly the same size will fit; in the photo you can see Ultimate washes and Vallejo Metal Color bottles. Unfortunately, MRP bottles won’t fit the Vallejo shelves and are unacceptably loose in the Tamiya 10 ml shelves, but it will be easy to make a new shelf.

The photo isn’t the final design. I’ve modified the shelves slightly, but more importantly I found that I can go up one more level! The good news is that I can print the two new sides and another shelf; snap the old one apart and the new one together. The bottle are staggered on every other row, this means that with the 6 shelves one rack can hold 27 Tamiya-sized bottles or 39 Vallejo-sides bottle (or 42 if they aren’t staggered, Tamiya bottles need to be staggered) or combinations of Tamiya and Vallejo bottles!

I haven’t decided if or how I’ll share this with “the world”, but if any of my friends here on ISM are really interested, PM me and I can send STL files. A note of caution, the snap together design requires a well calibrated printer, but I have a small test model to see if it works. Also, as you can see in the printer picture above, the shelves need a large print plate and have to be oriented to fit. For my Ender 3 I had to set the build plate size in Cura to be 235mm x 235mm; even then it just fits.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of printing to do, I need three of these and the total print time is around 30 hours for one!

[KalebB]

3D printing continues to blow my mind. I used to run CNC machines for a firearm manufacturer, and 3D printing is like the reverse of that in a way, with CNC you're removing material to form what you want, and with 3D printing you're applying material to build up a shape. Awesome stuff Bob!

[Twokidsnosleep]

Super cool Bob, good on ya!! This is on my list of wants as well
Love the new little projects and I bet you take to this like a duck to orange sauce
All this newfangled computerizing isn’t in my wheel house.
I have been struggling with a laser etcher trying to manipulate the program








To be honest it is my mental block of PC style programming and the trackpad on the PC. My Mac stuff just seems so more intuitively logical to use. Just erased my complex design last night by hitting no instead of yes. Shut off the lights, walk away

[BobM]

3D printing continues to blow my mind. I used to run CNC machines for a firearm manufacturer, and 3D printing is like the reverse of that in a way, with CNC you're removing material to form what you want, and with 3D printing you're applying material to build up a shape. Awesome stuff Bob!

Hah, never thought of it that way. Always thought of CNC as start with a block and remove everything that isn't your part.

[BobM]

I have been struggling with a laser etcher trying to manipulate the program

To be honest it is my mental block of PC style programming and the trackpad on the PC. My Mac stuff just seems so more intuitively logical to use. Just erased my complex design last night by hitting no instead of yes. Shut off the lights, walk away

Don't you know, midnight programming is a bad idea...