Saturday, September 30, 2017

3D printed soft jaws

So I've been a little slow to make progress on the CNC conversion. Besides work ramping up and kids' evening sports I've been occupied by building combat robots. Here's my 3 pound bot, Love Hate Love (left) inspired by my 1lb plastic bot, Rain When I Die:




If you sense a theme in the names, it's the song playing when I go to hit "Save" on the CAD file, and I've been on an Alice in Chains kick as of late.

In the process of making hubs for the wheels, I needed a pair of soft jaws. I have two 3D printers so I whipped a set up in CAD and printed them off. I added them to Thingiverse. Here's what they look like on the lathe:

They are printed with ABS at 100% infill. I don't expect them to last terribly long but they work well for touching up parts and surface finish passes. I plan on printing a pair in Nylon in the near future. 

more successes

Next thing to do was cut something with multiple depths. Eventually I'd like to make some keychains for gifts and myself and family (wel...