It fit.

This was basically the first "real" job on my new Gweike M3 Pro fiber laser. The kerf on it is so thin it's ridiculous. The outline of this first 'e' looks rough because the DXF I imported had a bunch of bumpiness in it, which I didn't realize until after the cut; I thought it was the laser, but it was actually faithfully reproducing flaws in the font. The other letters were much better, but even this isn't bad.

The letters stand off the wall on aluminum pins. I needed to make about 25 of these. Here's one, with a grooved and chamfered head at the top and a threaded end at the bottom. Making the other end is three operations (groove, chamfer, deburr) plus chucking and unchucking, and I was pretty happy with how fluid I got it. The threads came from a shop-made tailstock die holder, which lets me knock them out quickly on a bunch of pins.

Here's the full set of letters, with a small box of mounting hardware.

My brother tried them out on his wall.

And here they are up at the curling club, one above each sheet's scoreboard. A closer look at the E, on its standoffs:

My first try was a shop drawer full of green printed bins, labeled for roll pins and the various metric and fractional screw sizes.

By July 2025 I'd moved on to whole storage cases. Gridfinity is built on a 42 mm grid, and this one is 5x5, so about 200 mm square. They're printable, stackable, and parametric, and the full model is available. I think I'm impressed. "RBOC" is an abbreviation for "Random Box Of Crap".

A couple of weeks later I'd been working on them in the background and wound up re-implementing, and then augmenting, my favorite design. The end result is pleasing: stackable, parametric, and fully 3D printed except for the window.

In December 2025 I made custom trays for the tool drawer under the CNC mill. The cutouts for the tools at the left were done with tooltrace.ai, which was pretty easy to use.

I don't know what to say. This might be the high point of the rest of my life.

The clock print has started. Here's the dial ring, with its Roman numerals.

And a build plate of red parts: three large spoked gears, a threaded post on a tripod base, and some small spacers and bushings.

The clock is assembled! And does not work at all. Debugging ahead.

It's hanging on a rough wooden board, with the white dial, red gear train, black hands, and a black pendulum with a gold bob. The weight is a gold cylinder hanging from a string.

For debugging, I just pushed on the various gears to see whether the escapement was moving. It stops moving at one point in the gear train, so that's where I'll go look for friction. I guess that's my printf. It will take me an hour to disassemble it, clean out the bearings, and put it all back together again. If I'm lucky, an hour.

That's one of the things I like best about mechanical stuff: to me, the answer is often super obvious. In robotics, we have a joke. If it's software, it takes eight hours to find and five minutes to fix. If it's mechanical, it takes five minutes to find and eight hours to fix. If it's electrical, it takes eight hours to find and eight hours to fix.

I did eventually get the clock working, although I had to put a lot more weight on it than I would have liked. But it ran great: it was within a minute a day after I tuned it. For a while. Then it started stopping every few days. Then every few hours. Now it just hangs on my wall and doesn't move. I can get it to tick for a bit, but somewhere inside, some sort of friction has built up. With gear ratios as high as a clock needs to have, any little thing can be a problem.

Hopefully I'll debug it again at some point, because it really is a cool project. I don't regret building it. I just wish it was ticking away rather than just being wall art.

On October 22 I started fabbing up a little catch basin. Sheet metal is fun. Here's the folded tray on the bench. I just cut the shape with some metal shears by hand, and spot welded the corners.

The drain needs a conical recess, so I 3D printed a one-off punch and die to make one. This is the design, in cross-section.

I already have a Harbor Freight 20-ton hydraulic press, like everyone has in their garage, but this is only 26 gauge steel, so a clamp or a bolt and nut is plenty.

It worked even better than I expected. Here's the clamp squeezing the printed die into the tray.

And the formed drain: a nice smooth conical recess.

The drain parts are 3D printed too. This is the drain fitting seated in the recess.

From underneath, the drain passes through the table via a printed hex nut fitting, with a clear braided hose attached below.

Here's the finished product (the photo at the top of the page), just waiting for the silicone to cure. I tilted it up ever so slightly so everything runs to the drain. I might need to add some bumpers at the edges to make sure the mill doesn't vibrate the whole thing loose. For obvious reasons I didn't want to fasten the pan down, although I could; a neoprene washer under the screw would probably work fine.

Here's the mill running with the pan in place. Working like a champ.

Fast, cheap… The laser cutter is still shrink-wrapped in the background, and the table is upside down, 2x4 legs sticking up from a plywood top, with a caster waiting to go on.

And good enough. Here's the laser on its finished rolling table, lid open, with the packing foam and exhaust fittings on the floor below.

I needed a 150 mm to 4" vacuum hose adapter. Oh noes, wherever will I get one? I printed it.

I always enjoy casting, and on my birthday in November 2024 I decided to try making some aluminum bronze for an espresso funnel. This is the sand mold, with a 3d-printed ring-shaped pattern pressed into it.

And the pour, at night in the backyard. You can see the glowing crucible, the furnace and the molten metal in the mold's pour opening.

It looks like it was a success: here's the casting freshly shaken out of the sand.

A couple of days later I started cleaning it up on the lathe. The aluminum bronze looks amazing as it cleans up. It's just 90% copper and 10% aluminum, and one application is propellers. It's really pretty.

A few days after that, I'd gotten in a bit of machining over lunch. Plenty left to do. The top is faced and the inside is bored, with some casting pits still remaining.

In January 2025 I finally finished turning the espresso funnel. It's totally ridiculous, but I wanted to make something out of aluminum bronze, and the 3D printed one I'd been using was unsatisfying. This one weighs like three pounds, which is very satisfying.

Here it is next to the purple 3D-printed one it replaces. I really should thin it down some more, but it's amusing me as it is.

A quick 3D print project: an add-on steam handle for the espresso machine, clamped to the steam knob with a small socket screw.

I'd been making (slow) progress on the basement shop remodel, and in early June 2025 I was edging closer to when I'd have to move things into their new space. I tried modeling and working with the layout virtually, but I find that kind of annoying. I've done it before by cutting out paper outlines, and that works really well for me: very quick to produce, tactile, visceral. But this time I already had all the models, so I figured, why not print them out?

The biggest thing to place is the Bridgeport mill, a 2J Series 1 from around 1976. It weighs about a ton, and it was fun to get it into the basement. It shouldn't be too bad to move from one room to the other, but we'll see.

A week later it was on to the actual moving. The printed model, with its little labeled machines and furniture, has turned out to be a really useful way to visualize arrangements.

Here's what it looks like these days. I still need to add more storage to it. And clean my desk.

First, the pattern for the casting I hoped to do that weekend: a tree of a dozen small open-frame pieces on a central sprue.

And a single piece, which is what each keychain will be.

A partially successful casting on the morning of April 27th. This is the robot part in the crucible, melting.

Breaking the investment flask open to see what came out.

And the aluminum tree itself. I only got 8 out of 12 pieces to come out, so I need to do another. I think maybe the graphite gasket I made didn't give a good seal, and I didn't get as much vacuum as I could have.

After fettling, the pieces got powder coated, and here they are curing in a toaster oven.

I finished the senior gifts on May 15th. I still have a largish brick of the aluminum left over from the melted-down part, since I didn't use much of it. It's a part we removed because we were over weight, and I plan to bring it in to show people just how much aluminum it was.

Need some ductwork for your laser? Just design and print some! Here's a tall round duct with mounting flanges, and a 45-degree elbow.

I did consider PVC pipe. In the end I didn't go with it because I already had a hole saw of a given size, the fittings are fairly expensive, and I didn't feel like driving over to Home Depot to buy another one. The slicer tells me the cost of the plastic, too: one part I'd just printed was $0.73 worth of PETG.

In April 2025 I finally got the laser set up in a cabinet that other people can be in the room with. It's a plywood enclosure with a green laser-safe viewing window and an LED strip, sitting on a 2x4 stand. The laser glows away inside.

On September 3, 2023, I milled a lathe tool holder, mostly because I just wanted to mill something. Here it is on the mill with a long step cut along it.

A few days later I test-fitted it onto the dovetail of my 250-222 quick-change tool post. I'm pretty happy with this fit.

And here is the finished holder on the lathe, clamping a boring/turning tool with a carbide insert. There's a brass knurled adjuster nut on a threaded stud, and four hex bolts. It came out okay. I think I'll make another one and see if I can do better.

The tailstock die holder was progressing in early October. Unfortunately, I bored the end out too big. Facepalm. It was fixable without starting over, fortunately.

To make up for my mistake, I turned an adapter for the end. I also made it dual size, so it can accommodate larger dies. There was still a bit left to do on it at this point.

Having a multicolor printer is great for stuff like this. I probably should have slowed the print down a bit, and I accidentally used silver rather than white for the sizes, but it's more than good enough for its intended purpose.

Here it is installed next to the lathe's DRO, a dial indicator on a magnetic base, and a bottle of way oil.

Then there's stuff like this. It's a support for holding long, thin things stable in the bore of my lathe. It prints in 20 minutes and cost $0.29 worth of filament. Ordinarily you'd use something called a lathe spider for this, which is a whole project of its own and potentially involves drilling holes in the lathe. This is so easy that I'll just make one whenever I need a different diameter.

I'm also digging just leaving a roll of white in the printer all the time so I can embed text in stuff, like the diameter on this one.

A little lathe upgrade I'd been working on: a linear-scale digital readout for the tailstock, on 3D-printed mounts with a printed clamp collar on the quill. One of those screws is a decoy, hiding the broken tap underneath it.

In December 2024 I printed soft jaws for the lathe chuck out of TPU, a flexible filament that's like a fairly firm rubber. Here's the first version fitted on a chuck jaw.

I added a giant fillet in that corner for the final versions, since that corner was obviously going to fail. Here's the final version.

I wound up not using these because - surprise! - metal chips are hot, and plastic doesn't like that. I'll have to do some in aluminum or copper one of these days.

I picked up a Vevor 6-inch six-jaw self-centering chuck with a D1-4 cam-lock backing plate for just north of $200. It arrived covered in grinding dust and with the burrs left on, so it's getting a few hours of deburring with files and blue shop towels to take it from "done" to "operates smoothly". It's nearly finished; next up is mounting it on the lathe and seeing how accurate it actually is. Updates to follow.

Here it is torn down on the bench: the body, the six jaws, the scroll ring, and the backing plate, with a set of needle files standing by.

The plan was to melt down some of the broken parts from that year's robot and cast keychains in the shape of the game piece, and maybe laser something onto them if there was time. This project was way more of a pain than I thought it would be, but I learned a fair amount, so I'll call it a win.

here's the finished keychain, presented to the seniors at the wrap-up banquet on May 19.

By July 13, 2023, the printer had gotten to the gears. They're herringbone gears, along with a worm and a shaft.

A week later I had it put together and winding a spool.

Here it is in action.

It works pretty well, but it was kind of a pain to assemble. Lots of the pieces didn't fit without sanding, and I bent or broke one or two of them trying to get them together. Still, I'm pretty happy with the result. The gears are pretty good. The worm gear kind of sucks, but it works nonetheless.

Better than PLA, but I wound up liking these better for removing things from the build plate.

To address the issue with the above unit wearing out, in October 2023 I made a couple of 3D-printed versions. First up was a prototype. It shows one of the drill bushings that I made to guide the drill, since if the mild steel I was using on the original version didn't stand up, the plastic definitely wouldn't.

My 3D printer has more than enough accuracy to place the holes. I measured the prototype and found it had placed that bushing to within 0.001" of the correct location, and since the bushing is reamed, the whole thing is probably within about 0.005" as far as putting the hole in the right place.

Of course, jigs get abused. The kids broke one and I broke another. In early November, I think this was at least version 5. Visible in the fifth hole from the left is the locating pin I made, so the jig can be used to make series of holes that are longer than the jig.

Here are the panel pieces coming off the printer: the front panel with the speed dial, the forward/stop/back rocker switch, and the four-digit LED display, plus a few blank panels.

I was down to my last roll of PETG when I printed this, which was a relief, because I will never use it again. It gave me stringing, voids, and blobbing. (2026 update: PETG is now my preferred material. The problems were likely due to not drying it. Having a better printer now helps, too.)

Holding the finished control box next to the mill and its DRO.

My daughter was about to turn 18, and she really likes Infinity Train, which is a bit obscure: a surreal animated series. I'd wanted to do more jewelry, and I'd done a few rings, so I designed these earrings based on One-One.

Here I'm placing the sprue in the middle of the 3D printed pattern. I wish I'd remembered to make some marks to help me center it, so that I could use it to grip the casting on the lathe.

With the sand packed, I separated the two halves of the flask so I could remove the pattern. The bottom half still has the pattern half-embedded in it, and the top half has the matching impression, with the hole for the sprue.

After the pour, I dug the casting out of the sand. It was looking good so far: you can see the disc, the pillar, and the spoon-shaped sprue coming out of the sand.

Success! It's super rough, though. I think I should have sieved my sand. But every surface is going to get machined, so it should be fine.

The next morning I started cleaning it up on the lathe. One face took a cut nicely and came up bright, with the rough sand-cast rim still around it. There were going to be some voids and inclusions in the finished part. Tim said that was fine, as long as it held the thing and conducted heat.

Flipping it around to do the other side meant gripping the faced rim with the chuck's outside jaws, with the sprue stub sticking out toward the tailstock.

It was loads easier to cut most of the sprue off on the bandsaw than to machine it away.

And done. The front face, up top, has a raised center step. This is the back: a shallow recess, with a bit of rough casting skin left on the rim. That's as far as I could take it down without running out of material. I should have allowed more room in the casting, so I'm calling the rough edge artistic. A few of the pits made it through, too.

It shipped off to Tim shortly afterward.

Here's the wax pattern cast from the 3D print, in blue. Oh hey, it worked.

Then I tried again, with what I thought was a better sprue design. This one is printed in grey resin.

That earring is slightly convex, like a contact lens. I failed many times to cast it in brass and aluminum bronze, but I learned a lot doing it. In the end I just printed it and spray-painted it.

The next year, my younger daughter had another Pi Day earring concept in mind: a sphere made up of the digits of pi. I worked through the math for it in OpenSCAD.

This was the prototype, printed in white resin and coming together a few days before Pi Day. The design is hers.

The finished earrings were done just under the wire on March 14th. I'm not sure why she wanted black, but they are as ordered.

Here's a better picture, after she highlighted the numbers.

Another look at the prototype.

The face was stained light and the body and wings dark. On October 24, 2021, I had the stained piece clamped to the bench and was off to find a stain color somewhere between those two.

The first route was a silicone mold. Here's the 3D-printed resin bust of Leonardo da Vinci, the blue silicone mold, and a yellow wax copy made from it. Next stop was going to be a plaster cast of the wax figure.

You can buy two-part casting silicones, but they're expensive and go bad quickly once opened, which makes them a poor choice for occasional home use. So I tried hardware store caulk as a casting medium. Straight out of the tube it's too thick to work well, but I finally hit on a recipe that is thin enough to flow around a model, cures quickly, and uses only easily available, relatively safe stuff.

The cutaway block shows that I could get it to set without voids by using a vacuum chamber. The complete mold shows that it takes detail well.

Amazing Remelt is a good product for this, but I think a homemade version costs about a fifth as much. It's just glycerin and gelatin. Here's the first experiment: the printed mold halves, with a translucent red gelatin casting between them.

And a demold success, with a teal gelatin block holding the impression of the bust next to the resin bust it came from.

The mold parted cleanly along the layer lines. There are some voids from bubbles, so I might need to refine my technique there.

Pouring the wax in stages did the trick. There is one very small area, down at the bottom, where the heat of the wax melted the mold where it was thin, but otherwise it came out great.

I think I'm done with this line of experimentation.