My Gweike M3 (the one I moved into the basement back in June) showed up with a pretty major defect: the polycarbonate lid is warped. Looking back at my pictures, it seems to have arrived that way.

The hump is big enough that if you just happened to be standing in exactly the wrong place, it is somewhat possible that a scattered reflection could escape and do damage. I have been wearing laser safety glasses when operating it, even with the lid closed, for that reason.

I did talk with Gweike support about it, and they asked if I thought it could be fixed. I said yes, because honestly, I do: it just needs something to block the light, and I figured putting a batten across the gap where the lid sits on the lid frame would work. They kindly sent me some consumables as compensation.

Of course it sat for a while. I have been chipping away at it. Unfortunately literally: I had the, as it turns out, dumb idea to just force it into submission with some bolts. The polycarb did not like that, and the first time I heard a little crack, I abandoned that idea.

Instead, I went back to the batten idea. I was going to use steel, but my experience with the polycarb made me super gun shy: I wanted something with more give. So: plywood. Cheap, I have a bunch of it, and soft.

It was also a chance to use my Vevor Mag Drill. I think this is the first time I've drilled holes with it, but the frame is steel, so it was a convenient way to make sure they were straight, since I had to get all the way through both sides of the box tube that makes up the frame.

A view of the inside. You can see where I used some epoxy putty to seal up a few errant holes. I really like that stuff. Easy to work with, dries really hard.

Next up on the laser will be finding some way to get a keyboard mounted to it.

On Sunday I went in to help out more on the Nova Labs renovation. I continued to work on getting the sink installed.

There was also work happening to clean decades of filth off of the ceiling, lest it drift down all over the stuff we're going to move into that space.

Didn't get pictures of this one, but we also worked on getting the Elite CNC set up with compressed air. We need something to cool the bit when we run aluminum, lest the bit clog up and break. Coolant is messy, but we've used compressed air with good success, so one of the other coaches tapped into the building's compressed air system and ran a line to the table. I'll try to remember to get a picture of it.

Busy weekend, obviously, but that's the sort of stuff I enjoy.

This is the first time I'll be doing anything substantial with 304, so I expect to learn a few things. It's for a project I can't talk about yet. I need to knurl, face, and part it. I think the lathe is up to it, so we'll see if my skills are, too.

We had an unfortunate incident at Nova Labs: a job got away from the user on "Big Blue", the 4x8 CNC router. I helped out with the repairs on it and on the other large CNC machine this weekend. I didn't get any pictures of the repairs (I'm still working on remembering to take more pictures), so here are some pictures of the damage instead.

The Onefinity Elite that our robotics team was so generously gifted behaves like a lot of smaller CNC machines: when you e-stop it, the steppers lose power and you lose your position. You can re-home it and it should resume pretty nicely, but that adds a bunch of time. I much prefer a different rule: no hands in the working envelope of the machine unless it is made safe. Having that be the e-stop is great, but not available here.

I figured out that the Masso controller has an input we can configure as a door sensor. When it's open, the controller holds motion and stops the spindle. So I'm going to rig up a switch we can flip when we're adjusting the work or cleaning up. The kids flip it to "hold", do their work on the table, then re-arm the system by flipping it back to "run".

The first piece is the housing, a 3D printed case that holds a two-position switch.

With the case done, I just need to get some wires hooked up to it and reconfigure the controller to use it.

I think one of the best habits we can give the kids is a strict safety environment. Nova Labs is, sadly, pretty lax at times. I routinely walk through the shops and see people without safety glasses on, which in my opinion is the bare minimum precaution people should be taking.

This is just a fun little nugget I picked up on Amazon. You can see it here. It's poorly made, but accurate to within about 0.010"/0.2mm, which is good enough for a lot of what I do. It will live in my pocket, so it being a bit of a piece of junk is fine. Maybe some day I'll make a nicer one.

That's permanent marker in the marks: the lines were basically unreadable to my aged eyes. I'm also very amused by the "two quarters" fractional label.

I had to do more work at the town home we rent out. Part of it was fixing the dishwasher install that I screwed up (the hose clamp wasn't tight enough). The other part was installing a new thermostat, since the old one had failed. Pretty easy, really, although I will note that ChatGPT saved me from wiring it wrong. Crazy times.