Tue 26 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
RepTab, our open source torch table – was featured in the January edition of MAKE Zine. Read the full article online at MAKE. You can follow the history of this development in former blog posts. Read more about RepLab – the Open Source Fab Lab – of which RepTab is a part.
Tue 26 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
You may have read the proposition of turning the LifeTrac tractor auger to a lathe in this post. Here are the initial results of putting together an open source lathe, plus drill and mill combination.
The bill of materials is:
Total – $800 for lathe, mill, and drill function – for 20 horsepower, and 5000 inch-pounds of torque, driven by Power Cube. See lathe build for other details. The total weight of the assembly is about 600 lb.
We start with a 5000 inch-pound hydraulic motor from the LifeTrac infrastructure, and connect it to a 12 inch chuck. We then add an xy table and a toolpost, and that constitutes a lathe. The entire assembly is mounted on our new 1/2″ thick steel welding table, supported by compressed earth blocks (CEBs). This is what you get:
Add another xy table on top of the first one, and you have x, y, and z motion. This suffices to turn the lathe into a milling machine.
If you use a milling-drilling vise, you can drill holes. If you use the lathe with a drill bit, to function as a heavy duty drill press.
Indeed, we are able to drill 1″ holes, without any predrilling! That’s encouraging. This is done by moving the workpiece into the drill bit. Here are the cuttings from 1/2″ and 1″ holes.
Here is a video of the drilling and lathing. We’re drilling 1″ plate with a 1″ drill bit. In the lathe test, you can hear what chatter sounds like at the end of the video, as the welding table starts to vibrate.
Overall, we have major success on the drilling function. Plus, we have major success in achieving uncontrollable chatter in the lathe function.
(more…)
Mon 23 Nov 2009
Posted by Marcin
The lathe is perhaps the most important machine tool in a workshop. In almost every kind of machining operation, either the work piece or the cutting tool turns. – link.
Read more about the practical basics of a lathe from a master of documentation, Chris Palmer of HydraRaptor.
We are approaching the lathe in a rather nonconventional way at Factor e Farm. We already have a heavy rotor with a detachable 20 hp hydraulic motor in the LifeTrac infrastructure: 
What if we convert this rotor to a lathe? See more on the wiki. The program is to mount the rotor to a 640 lb steel table (welding table), and see how well we can do to start a multipurpose machining center. We proposed a similar concept before, but alignment issues remained unresolved in that program. 
The present concept replaces the concrete block with a heavy metal table, uses the auger rotor above, and replaces the long rail with a 4-point alignment mechanism:
Wed 18 Nov 2009
Posted by Marcin
Many of you may have heard of the MIT Fab Lab – a mini factory where you can make just about anything. If you have $100k to spend, you can get one for your home.
What if we reduce the price of this toolset by a factor of 10? While we are at it, why not add about five times the functionality in that price? That is exactly what we plan on doing: RepLab – the open source Fab Lab. Read the wiki entry on this here, and see the other articles on RepLab here.
(Image from new website by Erik de Bruijn – http://www.replab.org/)
Sounds unreal? Yes, prior to the internet age. Now we have open source development – and the price of hardware is dropping drastically. My favorite example is RepRap, the 3D printer – which you can build for $300 in parts – because the plans are available for free. A commercial version would cost you about $20k - or over 60 times more.
So how do we go about achieving this unimaginable feat? (more…)
