Pasta Drying Rack

I’ve not posted in a while and although I have been busy doing many things, I’ve not had anything thought worth posting about. But…

Over the weekend my son and I were talking about his love of cooking and the pasta maker he received for Christmas last year. I saw a pasta drying rack at the store, but it was difficult to store and cost quite a bit for what it was. I told him I bet I could make something better than the one I saw and with scrap I had lying around the house.

Here is that design:

Overview of the drying rack

It comes apart into 4 pieces, the base, top and 2 vertical supports. The other pieces I glues together with waterproof glue. It may not be the biggest… drying rack in the world, but it did meet the need and I was able to make the prototype in less than an hour.

Here are the other design elements:

Hopefully, the drawings are all accurate and detailed enough so that anyone with the skills could make on.

Replacing the Z axis bearings on my 3018 CNC

Recently I’ve started to hear a grinding noise when the Z axis was moving on my 3018. Clearly, this is supposed to be a smooth process, so I knew something was wrong. Before I started my next project, I better replace the bearings.

Fortunately, the bearings are a relatively inexpensive part on Amazon:

Amazon.com: uxcell LM8SUU Linear Ball Bearings 8mm Bore 15mm OD 17mm Length for CNC Machine 3D Printer 4pcs : Industrial & Scientific

The process for replacing them is involved though with total disassembly of the left side of the CNC machine. Fortunately, there is a video that walks through the process:

Doing a simple repair/upgrade on my Genmitsu CNC router 3018-Pro: slipping bearings

The individual that made this video also went through a modification process to keep the bearings from slipping. Rather than do that, I 3D printed some bearing clips that hold the bearings in place effectively:

CNC 3018 Pro bearing holders by cebess – Thingiverse

These clips are for the X and Z axis bearings, which want to slip out.

Lasering a candle stand

I was at my wife’s aunt’s house this summer and noticed a Frank Lloyd Wright inspired candle holder. It was simple and elegant.

I thought I could do something similar now that I have a laser – lord knows I wouldn’t want to cut these tiny slots out with a scroll saw.

First, I searched the internet for one of the FLW square designs. Just do an image search and you will find many of them.

I then found out about a GitHub tool called boxes.py and used it to design the box that I could cut with my laser.

Next, I took the design into Lightburn and loaded the FLW image and converted it from raster to vector, placing it in the box sides.

I was ready to go and burned out an accent rectangle as well as cut the design and the box elements:

I just have a bit of sanding and it should all fit together, something like this:

The sides are hard maple and took about an hour each to cut. The bottom is walnut and it is much easier to cut through.

Finished the Great Wave print

Just thought I’d share a photo of the laser design I was working on, now that I have framed it and added a layer of epoxy.

I’ve been framed

I made the frame out of some scrap Walnut I had. It looks good from a couple feet away.

The picture elements look different from various angles, due to the nature of wood grain and how it interacts with the pigmentation. The effect is most noticeable with the red/orange/yellow of the sunset/sunrise.

Watercolors and wood

Just to try something different, I thought I’d use some watercolor pencils on wood, to add a bit of color to my laser efforts.

First, I searched for something that might stand out if I could turn it into a laser cut wood piece. I settled on a picture based upon The Great Wave. I thought the colors might stand out well.

I then had to take the illustration, edit it and then turn it into a series of line/strokes that my laser could burn. This is a function built into Lightburn. I sized the end result for a thin piece of scrap hard maple I had lying around and then burned it in.

Next, I colored in the various parts of the wave and a sunset/sunrise in using my watercolor pencils. Along the way, I determined that the white really didn’t do much on the wood — how disappointing.

Once I had everything colored in, I used a brush with some water to move the ‘paint’ around. Here is the end result — not really all that good, but interesting.

Watercolor wave

I wonder if using more water to move the pigment around will help it look a little better. The picture is about 8″ x 5 1/2″.

Moving on to cutting wood with the new laser

I have done numerous tessellations over the years and most of it has been with 5mm thick stock, so I have a small pile of it available. I wondered if I could get the new laser to cut through some hard maple. It took numerous trials, but eventually it is working fairly well.

Along the way and after watching many YouTube videos, I determined that airflow over the beam is critical to cutting wood. If there is insufficient air flow, the smoke gets in the way and/or the wood catches fire. Here is a picture of some of my later attempts. Earlier attempts were just flaming craters.

With only one pass over the path, I was seeing slight burn through on the back side of the board. Setting the Lightburn to go a little faster and performed two passes worked. The cuts shown are labeled with the speed, the laser strength and the number of passes over the path. The labeling was done at 3000 mm/min and 60% power.

The ornament below is one I designed that may be too fine for this setup. I was shocked at how well Joseph’s staff came out though, since it is about a millimeter thick. A bit more refinement of design and possibly scaling the whole thing a shade larger and it should be fine.

The airflow mechanism I printed attaches to the plastic shielding on the bottom of the laser. I try to target the air on the exact spot where the laser is focused.

I originally tried a 3D printed nozzle and guess what — it could get a bit too hot if there were any air issues. I moved on to an aluminum nozzle you would use with inflatable furniture, and just 3D printed the mount on the laser. The holder for the nozzle is printed using PETG.

Note that I am cutting the wood on a brass grid to help airflow when the board is cut through. The grid provides someplace for the air to flow and escape below the wood.

A few more refinements and I think some real possibilities will develop.

Never say never, again

Once again I noticed that I have not been blogging as much as I could/should.

I had dinner last night with a neighbor who is writing a book on architecture via many posts in his blog. This technique allows him to get down in the ether his thoughts, before he losses them. He can then mine that repository for more cohesive thought later.

The whole discussion made me feel guilty (don’t ask me why), since I have a number of posts to share that have been going on. I have been getting a number of weekly posts out for our local ham radio group, so maybe that has been quenching the posting desire. Oh well, here goes…

A while back I mentioned that I had done my last wooden tessellation. As in the case of so many final pronouncements, it appears that there was at least one more in the back of my mind that was waiting to get out. Since I had done shore birds, reptiles, sea horses, turtles… it seemed that fish were under represented.

This is my attempt to address that gap:

A fish based tessellation

That design is made from purple heart, walnut and hard maple using a design I created for my CNC machine.

Now, I just need to clean it up a bit more and then mount them all in a matrix of my office.

Lasers for hobbyists

Recently, I gave a presentation to the Tech Enthusiast SIG at our woodshop guild. I just thought I’d share it here in case it is of any use to someone. The presentation is shared in both PDF and PPTX format.

The goal of the presentation was to help people who are thinking about buying a laser scribe or cutter. I shared the attributes of the device that I looked at and why. I am sure it isn’t a perfect list, and everyone has their own criteria that are critical to them, so look it over.

I currently own two very low end lasers, one for very small precision projects and another for larger designs.

The last tessellation

Since I purchased by CNC machine, I’ve been creating various wooden tessellations. Now I’ve finished my fourth one and I hope my last.

It is not that these are that hard to design and create, it is just tedious.

I cut these out four at a time

I am thinking about taking all four designs:

Seahorse

Lizard

Turtle

as well as a topographical map of Hilton Head and the surrounding area.

I definitely know much more about the use of epoxy resins than I did when I started. It is hard to believe the lizard started back in 2019.

A trial at moving away from Universal G-code Sender for my CNC

It has been a while since I’ve written a blog post so I thought this topic was worthy. I was having trouble with the latest updates to GCS. The commands were just not flowing at a consistent rate. I rebuilt by old Pi2 and it still wasn’t working well. In the process, I had to recall all the things I’d forgotten about rebuilding the code and using VNC to access it.

Finally, I just thought to myself “What else is out there that may work more reliably?” I first built a version of Grbl Controller. This worked, but it was a pretty low end tool. I got the instructions to build it at:

Installing GRBL Controller on the Raspberry PI (alldonemyself.blogspot.com)

I then thought I’d try another open source approach. This one is primarily written in python. bCNC is a fully cross-platform solution. It was easy to install on the Raspberry Pi and runs within the GUI. This project is nearly full-featured with a g-code visualizer, code editor, virtual pendant, jogging, and easy coordinate system setup. I have it running over VNC still, though it wants a larger screen than my old 7” Android tablet I have mounted over my CNC machine.

Once you have python installed on the Pi, installing bCNC consists of:

sudo pip install --upgrade bCNC

You can also do an install from git:

sudo pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC  # if you want git version

To run it just:

python -m bCNC

The one problem I have had so far with bCNC is the visualization of the model isn’t quite right. It stops at line 9999, though the instructions to the CNC go all the way until the end. I am going to install from Github and see if that is more up-to-date. Here is what it looks like:

As you may notice (at the bottom of the screen) this G-code file has 456978 lines, so 9999 is just not going to cut it.