Early Tiger 1 from sPzAbt 503

[cahlfors]

People have been picking on me for not fixing the front ventilator. I do not understand why?

So, I got the printer going again to create a plastic prototype to test the installation:


The new part came out so, so. There are some printing overhang issues with it, but it is only a temporary part. Here it is together with the stock part that people have complained about. The similarity is striking: They are both round!


My idea of installation seems to work - the ventilator can be adjusted to the correct position and does not fall off...


Maybe, perhaps in a distant future, I will make one out of metal...

Cheers,
/Christoffer

[cahlfors]

Meanwhile, I wanted to try my luck at furniture making:



Unfortunately, the fibers got a bit trashed, because the mill went the wrong way. It turned out that "climb" in the CAM program means counter-clockwise. But no worries.
The finished part came out like this and I am so pleased with it that I will use these knobs for all the closets in the house!



You may notice that the steps are too big for the lower part. I have increased the resolution by a factor of five for the next run. It is still in the mill and has taken forever to complete, but what would you not do for total perfection?

Knock on wood!
/Christoffer

[Nafets]

[cahlfors]

Armed with a working CAM toolpath, I decided to have a go in aluminum and everything went well. It took a day and a half to complete. Now I will make all the closet doorknobs out of aluminum instead!



It looks like it was made of a precious metal like platinum, but it is all aluminum - I promise! All the soft, fuzzy stuff was just enough to stuff a pillow.

Sweet dreams!
/Chris

[Nafets]

what did you start with 100x100x100 ?

[cahlfors]

Round stock 70 or 80 mm, something. Only marginally oversize.

But I found another use for the knobs:





/Christoffer

[mrTyko]

Robert

[cahlfors]

The gun elevation motor in the turret has always been a problem and in need for a redesign. I followed Nafets' idea to invert it:


The bracket is a plastic prototype to check the fit. As originally designed, the motor was mounted from below and as the turret rotates, the motor snags just about any wiring in the hull. Also, in order to remove the turret, it needed support blocks to avoid standing it on the motor.

A small chain drive transfers the power to the elevation screw mechanism, which is still the original:


If all goes well, I will mill the bracket out of aluminum. It may take a while, though, since I am piloting the new CAM stuff in FreeCAD, which is not quite production ready. But the interest is great and there are lots of people working on it, so it is moving fast!

Then, there are a couple of other things that are cooking as well.

Cheers,
/Christoffer

[Christer 2a6]

Mycket stilit !!!! Trevligt med maskiner !!!!. Men det är skoj med fil ibland oxo.

[cahlfors]

Well, hmm.
The advantage of a rapid prototyper is that you can test things and adjust rather quickly.
It turned out that the motor got a little too close to the elevation arm:


There were too reasons for this. One was that the entire bracket was bent upwards by the forces. There was too little material here to counter the lifting force, so I added some (to the left in the picture):


The other remedy was to simply move the motor mount out a little bit, together with the elevation screw and the result was this:


The overall installation:


Hope this will do. I am currently unable to test it.

Cheers!

[cahlfors]

Eurovision song contest!
Means an entire undisturbed evening in the cave:

[Nafets]

[cahlfors]

Time for an update.

I have been busy on multiple fronts, as usual. The one that has progress to show is the replacement of the discrete electronics (that replaced the old relay stuff some years ago) with an Arduino Mega controller.

This mess:

IMG_6278_resize.JPG (555.52 KiB) Viewed 2521 times

is now replaced by this very tidy installation:

IMG_6280_resize.JPG (505.99 KiB) Viewed 2521 times

Er, well. Hm.

Anyway, what I did was to replace the board on the left with its ten or twelve MosFETs and Benedini smoke controller with the Arduino Mega with only four MosFETs on the right; one for each item to be controlled. Pls excuse the blurry picture:

IMG_6279_resize.JPG (298.44 KiB) Viewed 2521 times

The big thing is that everything is now completely configurable in software!

However, the number of wires is still a problem... Will need to do a bit of thinking!

Cheers!

[mrTyko]

Underbart o se att det inte bara jag som har ordning på sladdar.

Försök o minska storleken på bilderna något, nästa gång.

Robert

[cahlfors]

I have been tinkering with a hit simulation for a long time now. Since I had to take apart the smoker to fix it, I figured this would be the time to test. The idea is to have orange light from below and smoke coming up above. I have seen similar in other contexts and it looks very convincing. However, I am not entirely happy with the result here:

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Not sure what to do, if it is worth developing somehow or if I should just abandon the idea and go for bigger speakers underneath the gratings instead...