Funny how most see a big paycheck and I see hours and hours of work. I believe you when you say at $ 750 you’re around min wage. Just like with all your other Erector set things making all these parts without the stamping machines they used is quite a feat in itself.
Good job and thanks for posting all the details.
Definitely a labor of love in most cases or a case of where I need something and make extras for sale. Not all of them are winners for sure. My bullheaded-ness really delayed this project. My wife is a UG designer and offered MANY times to draw up the parts for me in CAD but I try to not draw her into my projects as she has enough of her own. I'm still a G-code guy and manually tell the machine the path to follow. It's pretty simple to know where the tangent points are on a right angle corner and add a radius. But on a complex profile, not so much.
I did the original pattern for the field casting by tracing a part on paper. Blew that up 4X and retraced the lines with a Post drafting machine. Used a circle template to draw the curves and crudely marked the centers of the arcs. Then measured up the tangent points for the starts/finishes of the arcs with the drafting machine. Problem was, if I was off in my scale measurement by >0.003" the routine would error. I spent hours fiddling with numbers to get it to run. In retrospect, if my wife had drawn it in CAD, the routine would have run with very little debugging.
We have Solidworks and are going to draw the part up during the Christmas break. She's really good on Unigraphics, so-so on SW, but it's just a short learning curve. I'll hopefully get proficient enough at it to handle things on my own.
I was expecting around $250 per part and figure that's where the price will drop as I start meeting market demand. I've got about 3 hours into each full assembly, though I'm not counting machine time as the field casting part is run lights out (about a 45 minute routine). It's also very inefficient in a few areas, could get 10 minutes out of the routine with some tweaking. I am usually doing the Foredom work on one part while another one is running so don't count machine time as I have plenty of other things to do while the mill is running.
There is some satisfaction in "completing the puzzle" too. It keeps the mind active working on something and learning new things in the process or "work the problem" for a better way of doing things. I tried doing some of the Foredom work with my die filer, but it yanked the part out of my hands and broke a file. Problem is in work holding, need something more secure. Or, use the right tool for the job. I'll try a Harbor Freight air filer next.
Also looking at some fixturing for the end work on the armature pieces. I currently set the part in the BP vise and manually make passes to cut 0.25" deep on the "T" surface. Remove the part, rotate 120 deg. and repeat. Then flip it over and do the opposite side. It takes me 7 minutes to do that end clean up. I'll probably "work the problem" by making a fixture to hold the armature and write a routine to do the cutting instead. I'm thinking about holding the part on an aluminum plate with a pocket cut 1 1/4" round, maybe 1/8" deep. That'll let the OD of the armature nest in place. Run a #8 screw down the center of the 5/32" hole to clamp it down to the aluminum. Have a fixed block that picks up one side of a "T" of the armature, and a second block on the opposite side with a screw that clamps the part in place. It might not take much time out, but would keep me from hand-cranking the BP.
Anyway, I'm convinced regardless of our end motivation, keeping the brain active by working on projects is a good thing. Lot's better use of my time than watching sports on TV or Netflix.
Bruce
