Very nice Mark. I'm sure anyone would be delighted to have that in their tooling inventory. Best, Kelly
You think the fact that it took you a while makes you special?! I think most of us have found the trip a bit labor intensive. But that is one nice casting you made. I'd like to see you put your name on the pattern so that future castings won't be mysteries as to their origin. It is too nice for "Anonymous" Denis
Great work Mark! I love it when we can go from scrap to a useful tool or part all in house. But unless you pour iron on your balls or set fire to your cat, the zombies on youtube dont care.
Thanks Jeff. Thats why my career as a Vlogger who throws shit of a platform hasn't got traction. The platform was too low! >> 18 million views? Humanity is doomed. Turns out this was a documentary... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy Mark
A guy I used to work for built a system to test windshields. The standard test was done in a drop tower with a 3" steel ball bearing. They would start at some height and keep raising the height until it breaks. Two problems, lots of work taking that 4 lb ball up a tower that could easily be 30' high over and over with small distance changes. Sometimes the starting drop broke the window so you didn't know how bad it really was. His solution was pair of coils under the glass that detected the ball. They simply dropped the known weight ball from the very top of the tower guaranteeing a break and coils measured the change in velocity of the ball hence directly indicating the force required in just one test. Genius!
Took me a while to find the Photos of the pattern. Still cant find the CAD files. Basically I modelled the pattern in CAD, and because it was too big for my 3D printer, I chopped it down to 1/3, using jigsaw puzzle like cuts. Printed it three times, clicked them together and glued it to the base board. A bunch of car body filler and paint work later, it was a pattern. It has core prints on each side, for a simple cylindrical sand core. The Core mould is made with flexures so that you just close it with a tie wrap, ram it, and then cut the tie wrap and can easily open it fto release the core. I used a baked core sand receipe with sugar water as binder. Mark
Thanks for the interesting report. Good thing this thread did not get so far off the rails as to miss out on a very nice piece of information. Again well done. Denis
Great to see you finally had a win when melting iron. When that happens so many other projects will come to mind you will need a larger supply of iron.