I find it quite strange to call it pen making as the work only involve the making of the barrel. The tips and mechanisms are from "pen kits" sold by folks like Penn State Industries, Rockler, Wood Turningz etc. It's more to me like customizing pens using different colors and/or materials with the rest remaining the same.

The kit I bought came with sufficient parts to make 5 "Gatsby Grande" pens.

Together with this, I packed into the packed into the cart a simple pen turning mendral used by most with a drill chuck, some boxes for the pens, plastic finishing pads, and 5 acrylic blanks.

To keep cost low, I left out a few items that were recommended to aid in turning the blanks. I plan to use what I've on hand to keep it within budget. Shipping alone was already 1/3 of the total cost. I wanted, initially, to do away with the mandrel as it is basically a rod measuring 6.22mm in diameter with M6 threads at the end, but for USD12+, I would rather pay for it and get on with the project. Turning such small diameter for length of 8.5" has always gave me problem...

For a start, I'll be doing mainly straight turning or with very gentle taper (using the compound slide) sanded smooth. As of now, I've no idea of what I have in my head is doable. Will take it a step at a time.

In fact, I've start some work preparing the blank. This will be posted in my next installment to keep this post cleaner.

Meanwhile, let me know if you have any tips and tricks on this to help me out here. TIA!

Ok, this has nothing to do with machining but another of my interest and competition of the limited budget for my hobby. I just bought another Seydel Saxony Chromatic to replace the one I screwed up, when try to customize it following the instruction on YouTube.

This is it:

Isnt she a beauty?

As to machining, I've been feeling lazy. The shop is still in its partial stage of a reorg, and I've not decided if I should have the PD400 base back on the wooden bench top. Having it on the main bench seems to waste the area behind and making access to the shelf and other stuff rather inconvenient. And there is also the steel pegboard which is now mounted on the wooden bench. I've yet to redo it such that it is elevated above the benchtop to allow tools to hang beyond the area of the pegboard.

Several more tygings to do before I can get back to start my projects, but I've just added one; machining a harmonica comb.

Lets see if I can get started tomorrow.

I did it!!!

​Just posted a moment ago on 2 discarded fridges of which 1 is at the bin centre on the ground floor of my block. With Terence's encouragement, I packed my tools and went down to dig out the compressor from the fridge tonight... lol. He was on the way here to paste me the solder mask paste and the nano scope and helped me to unscrew the 4 bolts holding the compressor down to the base plate.

It was a fun day for me. Found a bargain on the Amax air compressor and finally did what I dare not do; salvaging a part from a thrown-away... I'll remember this day...

I've been buying quite a bit of stuff online from stores listed in the Chinese app "Tao Bao".  So far the stuff I've purchased were smaller items like the ER16 and ER32 wrenches, ER32 cap etc.  Lately, I've been wanting to relocate the WayTrain bandsaw to a trolley with 3 shelves.  This will help to provide additional storage space for the shop, as well as giving me the flexibility to move the bandsaw out of the way of certain part of the workbench.  The bandsaw is currently clamped onto the Black & Decker workstation, which is standing next to the area on the workbench where I do laying out on the surface plate with the height gauge.

This was what I wanted to purchase initially:

The size of this trolley is ideal.  It cost more than what you can dig out from TaoBao as it is of thicker sheet steel, better and bigger wheel set, and you don't have the bolts & nuts protruding from the bottom of each shelf.  The price is about double of similar type with thinner material.

​While I was browsing, I saw this:

I went "WOW"!!! Finally a chance to have some professional looking stuff in my shop!  After chatting about this with Terence over Whatsapp, I decided to go for it, given the lower price as compared to the open shelves trolley, though this uses thinner sheet metal and has narrower width.  Wanted the black as it looks the nicest (to me), among others but it cost RMB20 more as compared to the rest.  Unfortunately, it was out of stock, so I went with the Green/Black as the green is pretty close to my Proxxon PD400.  After confirming the order, I remembered my bandsaw, which will be sitting on the top of the trolley cabinet, is mostly light blue... 

At about the same time, I picked up a couple of steel pegboards with accessories to keep the shop neat and tidy (excuses to satisfy the urge of buying...).

With these, I also bought a couple of angled plate stand so that I can mount one piece on to the worktable which I'll be converting to my working desk.  At present, the Proxxon PD400 is sitting on it.  If the pegboards proved to be good, I'll be buying smaller pieces to mount onto the sides of the trolley.  I should be receiving the pegboards some time next week.  Once I have them mounted and filled with tools and stuff, I'll update the blog with pics.

I'm now patiently waiting for all the stuff to come in to complete the packing of the shop for the Lunar New Year.  I hope to spend more time in the shop going forward to learn how to make useful things for the shop.  Seems like I've forgotten about "buying less, building more" ...

Have a blessed night.

Some time in late October, I commissioned a designer on Fiverr to help design a logo for my site. On Nov 1st, she completed 3 designs for my selection. I like them all!!! But I can't be using them all on my site, so I sent them to some of my friends asking them for their opinion.

theseare the designs:

Though later on, somehow, maybe due to miscommunication, she sent me the file for this:

The difference is at the top; 2 small gears instead of 2 slotted screw heads. Anyway, I proceeded with it and made myself this!

my very own shop T-shirt!!! I had this printed in Malacca during our family trip. Couldn't help it. Now I've to figure out how and where to add the logo to the site. Quite bad at this kind of thing. Not a creative person...

Drop me a note if you have any suggestion please.

​Have a blessed weekend!

With the wiring of the KBIC out of the way, the next is to either buy or make a tachometer to display the spindle speed and also to feed Mach 3 the pulses coming out of it.  Before i know it, Terence has already completed one and generously shared it with me, all parts included.  The completed tachometer uses 7-segment LED as display.  From the case he printed, it looks good through the tinted acrylic front cover.

Next is to wired it up so that it can signal to Mach 3 via its index pin. This, I encountered lots of problem because of electrical noise in my system.  To solve this problem, Terence designed an addon board to filter out the noise so that the microcontroller is able to see the pulses without false trigger.  With the addon board design done, I asked for the files to experience milling a simple PCB on my own.

The process was straight forward enough, though I did encounter some difficulty along the way due to my inexperience milling something so small and mainly in filling up the board with components.  But I managed.  This is the board freshed out of the mill:

To fill up the board with components, I've to make several purchases in term of equipments.  The cheapo soldering iron I have on hand made soldering SMD parts a terrible experience.  Since it was my birthday then, I bought myself some presents... lol. Excuses...

With the 2 bigger purchases and some little stuff like flux, I began filling up the board with components that are smaller than a grain of rice...  Under magnification, I can see that my hands tremble quite a bit when position the components.  The result, after several tries, is passable.

As the whole process was rather long, with lots of screw-ups mainly due to mistakes and stuff, I'll put the pics below and caption them as I go.  Hoover your mouse cursor over the pic for the caption.  Apologies for using this format to present the pics as I've problem selecting the many pics I've on my iphone and uploading it here.

Finally, what I wanted few years ago came through, all because I've a good bro guiding and helping me along the way.  He guided me through several nights and helped troubleshoot over Whatsapp till 3-4am, on things like how to solder SMD, figuring out what went wrong when things didn't happen as it should.

I'll be making another tachometer using arduino, as well as making the sensor Terence did with another type of sensor.  All these will be for further learning and practicing.

I've just trammed up my wabeco mill today.  Should be starting with one of the manual machining projects which I wanted to start several years back.  This hobby kept my mind keen and not wander over negative things.  A little selfish though as I occupy of of the 3 bedrooms in my flat for it.  Both my teens are bulking together in the little room they have.  Sense of guilt?  Yes.  I need a solution to this.

I'm praying for a place with 4 bedrooms so that each of the girls can have their own room while I can still have my little cave to indulge myself in.  Lord, grant me my wish...

I've been wanting to do this for a long time. Jeff Birt of Soigeneris, whom I bought the motion control system from, did a write up on the topic, but I just lack the courage to proceed, given my very limited knowledge in electrical works.  He did a PDF and have it posted on his website which you can view the PDF on his site here: http://www.soigeneris.com/Document/Gecko/Using_the%20Gecko_G540_VFD_Output.pdf.

​The idea is a simply one; using Gecko's VFD circuitry to output signal between 0V - 10VDC and feed that to the KBIC board. This replaces the existing speed control potentiometer.

From Jeff's writing:

What he said makes sense to me; we have live voltage of 240V on one end. Any accidentally grounding will send a nasty shock to the operator or fry the KBIC board. Also, when operating in auto mode, there is no reason to leave the speed pot connected since the pot is no longer in control of speed adjustment.

With Terence around and doing the same, I mustered up my courage and went ahead with the mod.  Here is a brief write up on my journey, based on the little I understand when Terence was trying to explain to me.

If you have any questions on this mod, drop me a note, I'll ask Terence for his input if its beyond me...

​Here goes:

​Knowing that I'm a total idiot with electrical stuff, Terence made me these - a wiring harness, completes with printed labels. Maybe can sell as a kit for those interested. 

The DB9 connector is for my Soigeneris' control box, which brought out the VFD to its back panel for neater connection.

The "kit" looks rather nice, much nicer that some of those I bought from companies abroad.

Some pics were taken before I start meddling with the components within the box.  Tend to forget what goes where after removing stuff...

Terence provided a sticker to mark out the hole location for the switch.  I screwed it up by pasting it more to one side... 

The square hole was more of a challenge to me.  So I decided to rough it out on the mill and finish it off with either a file or the jeweller saw.  As the plastic box flexes quite a lot, 2 pieces of wooden blocks were used to support from the bottom.  Quite a bit of filing was needed before I managed to squeeze in the molex connector.

Connecting the speed pot to the switch.  Basically just a follw the label and insert the connectors operation.  I'll have to slap myself if I screw up even this... 

I've forgotten to take pics while putting back the board to the box.  Its a tight squeeze but everything went in without a problem.

Having the ability to control the spindle speed in my gcode is really a dream coming true, all thanks to my buddy Terence.  The mod has yet to be completed as we need to tell Mach3 the speed the spindle is spinning at (calibration) so that it knows how much to put out for the speed commanded.  So the next part of the project involves making a tachometer that reads the spindle speed and output it to both the LED display as well as to Mach3 via its Index pin.  It is a tougher part for me as it involves electronics work.  But so far I managed, with lots of help of course! lol....

This stage was made so easy because of the fact that most of the things were done for me with the kit.  It turned out to be not as scary as I envisaged it to be.  Let me know if you are contemplating to do the same.  Send me some pics if you may, while doing it.  I'll post them up.

Meanwhile, have a 
Merry Christmas!!!

No pic for this post. Just to dicument what I tested like night, before turning in.

I stripped the handheld contactless tachometer to see if any solder joint came loose. The tachometer decided to start working again after I put the board back to its case.

To start my test, a small piece of black stick was pasted onto the larger spindle pulley. With the trimpot turned to max, the readout showed a number above 10,000 rpm. As the display was jumping around quite a bit, I don't know how much above 10,000 rpm it really was running at. If you remember from my previous post on installing the pulley, I didn't adjust the preload of the spindle.

Maybe it's time for me to make a lithopane of my family with the higher speed spindle pulley installed.

After fooling around for a couple of weeks, I've finally completed the 3 rollers... Learnt quite a bit along the way on cutting such small wheels.  Bulk of the time were spent on the notebook working on the CAD drawings and setting up the roller blank.  My breakthrough came when the Thai hobbyist (Instagram handle max_pannara) replied with his method of holding down the rollers.  But, unlike him, I'm unable to remove the completed rollers by plying them off with a flat head screw driver.  I did manage to work around the problem by drill through holes in the recess holding each rollers and tap them out from the back.  This is not very efficient as I'll have to indicate the plate in again after each batch.  Since I'm will not be making many, I'll live with the trouble.

I'm looking to take videos of the machine in operation.  Saw from the iPhone App "Geek" that a GoPro look-alike is going for about SGD 50 to SGD60 excluding shipping.  Very tempted to get one to try but I've to control my spending.

Ok, that's all for the day.  Hope to update you folks soon on my activities in my home shop.

Be blessed!

Everyone has been telling me that to mill with tiny endmills, I need very high spindle speed.  The max speed of the default Sherline spindle is 2800 rpm, which mean that I've to go extremely slow (around 50mm/min) and very shallow (like 0.2mm in aluminium) if I'm to use a 1mm endmill.  The last roller I need was done at 100mm/min with DOC at 0.20mm per pass.  I was told that I'm risking the endmill.

I remembered buying the 10K pulley upgrade from Mike of SG Tooling several years ago and started digging through the boxes.  Found it still wrapped up in plastic in the box.  After reading through the installation guide many times, I proceeded to put it on the machine.

Its now 2.30am in the morning.  I think I better stop here and get some sleep.  I want to bring the girls out tomorrow to walk along the river near my place.

Let me leave you with this video of the spindle running up to its max speed, whatever it is, since I didn't adjust the spindle preload and have no way to test.  Click here to view on YouTube:  Sherline 10k RPM Pulley in operation

Have a blessed week folks!