PyroSam

Hi Deano, thanks!

I decided to do it mostly with wood as it's just easier for most. I do have access to metal working tools but far more have access to woodworking tools, and frankly I prefer wood as it's cheap and easy to find if you screw up or re-design midstream.

I haven't woodworked for a few years and I was really surprised how junky the wood is these days! The plywood is good one side plywood but has lots of puttied over knot holes and when you cut into it it has lots of voids in the laminate. The dimensional lumber also has lots of knot holes and I had to dig to get anything even reasonably straight! I dunno if that's the result of the newer more green forced growing methods or if our local lumber yard is carrying lower quality stuff these days.

I will probably design a box to fit over the wood deck for storage. I'm thinking some drawers could probably fit under it too. The motor mounts are readily available online. 5mm thick and seem sturdy enough. Cutting the stands for the mounts on the tablesaw wasn't bad at all and with a backstop set on the miter gauge they are came out even easily.

I mounted the motor rollers 1" apart and put the arms fairly close as I'd like to do some small shells if I can for reloable cakes. If I can't I may build a small one just for that purpose. If this one can do 3-6" and maybe 8" I'll be happy! But if it could do the smaller consumer festival ball size too that'd be a real bonus.

I thought about angle iron for the upright arm mounts but the wood was easy to make and it seems sturdy enough, we'll see. Most shell pasters of this type seem to put the back arm at a higher angle and the front one at a lesser angle. I dunno why. I put mine both at a 50 degree angle. I chose 50 because if you use a CAD program and draw the various sizes of shells sitting on the rollers and then scribe a line down the edges of the shells it's almost exactly 50 degrees. I don't think the angle of the arms is a big deal, I don't really think there is a wrong angle - as long as the bearing blocks get to where they need to be things should work.

I chose not to spring load the front bearing block as it just makes it easier to build and commercial units don't all use them and they seem to work fine. We'll see if it's needed in practice, if it is it's not that hard to add it in.

They make double t-nuts but they're only an inch apart and I wanted them further apart on the arm mounts. I need to dig and see if they make a triple or quadruple t-nut I could use as it'd be nice to not have to line up the t-nuts when putting the arms on and off. These will get knobs instead of bolts eventually. If I can't find a long t-nut I may red loctite a stud in the t-nut and chase the lock nut in the knob with a tap so it's no longer a lock nut and then leave the stud long enough to stick out of the middle of the knob - then you could just twist the stud to move the t-nut to get it aligned in the slot. It's not a big issue, it's easy enough to remove and replace the arms as it is, it could just be a little easier is all so I may try to fix that.

The taping arm uses a piece of the t-slot extrusion with flat iron on the sides to allow for the taping wheel and tape guide roller. The nice part of using the flat with the extrusion is that you can adjust the overall length of the taping arm by loosening the t-nuts and sliding the flat iron arms in or out. Hopefully the t-nuts won't tend to work loose in operation, we'll see!

To make the spacers for the taping wheel so it sits dead center of the taping arm I just used some copper water pipe and cut it with a tubing cutter. That worked really well - you can make a very accurate and square cut with a tubing cutter.

That's as far as I've gotten. I need to finish up the tape rollers and figure out a spring mount. Then maybe I can get to turning some shells and working on the control software - and sort out any bugs that will invariably creep in!

Well, there it is - it's not as sexy looking as the all metal ones, but it was easy enough to build and I didn't have to run down any odd metals or have any welding or machine work done (yet anyway!).

Thoughts, comments, suggestions? (all are welcomed!)

PyroPDC,

What was entailed in converting your stinger to a super stinger?

Hmmm, this unit allows you to talk the motors through a serial port by just issuing simple commands to it. Heck, I bet a batch file could be used! (not pretty, but I bet it would work!). It's also a bipolar driver so one can take advantage of the cheaper higher torque bipolar motors. I even read in one of the forums where a guy was able to use a usb to serial adapter on a lap top that didn't have a traditional serial port - spiffy! Though it's listed as a kit, it apparently isn't as I've seen it on serval sites and it's always listed as fully assembled and tested. There seems to be some question on it's current handling capability though as many sites list it as capable of 8 amps but the pdf documentation says 6. You'd probably need heat sinks and a fan for 6 amps but that's a minor cost. It doesn't report inputs back for external things like the stepper bee does but that capability could be added through kits that use the parallel or serial ports.

I've ordered a copy of Visual Basic and a basic learning book for it as I've never used Visual Basic, just QBasic and PowerBasic (yeah, I'm old! LOL!).

http://store.qkits.c...fo.cfm/KT-5197A

Not really related (yet), but I ran across some stuff on a new tiny little computer called a Raspberry Pi that looks really spiffy for use in experimenter projects. It's not a mature product yet, but I'm sure it will be soon so it may be worth keeping on eye on.