Molds in Progress and the Crow Skull Project

Happy Wednesday Everyone,

It’s been a busy week for us!

Progress on the Molds

We told you last week that to get things moving as quickly as possible we placed the order for our molds to be made for the new injection molded parts since that is one of our longest lead time parts.

We are excited to share that things are progressing well on that front. The CAD models for the molds are complete and the factory shared them with us. It’s quite impressive to see the engineering that goes into making the tools to make the parts.

Here you can see the mold for our updated arm part. This part will be molded from POM which is a self lubricating plastic often sold under the trade name Delrin. One of the big advantages of using injection molding is that it lets us work with truly high quality materials to make tremendously strong parts.

The mold is a two part mold with an upper and a lower cavity. Hot liquid plastic will be injected into the mold where it will cool.

On each side there are a series of injector pins which will be used to push the part out of the mold once it has cooled. The placement of these pins is critical to prevent the part from warping. You can see that the mold design here uses round pins and also oval pins which are made to match our parts geometry.

You will be able to see very slight marks on the final part where these pins push on it. These are called “witness marks”. Keep an eye out for them when your parts arrive and think about the mold that they came out of 😃.

Similarly here is a cut away view of the mold for our new belt guards. This mold makes four at a time. These will be made from glass fiber reinforced polycarbonate for maximum stiffness.

Progress on Other Parts

The molds are our longest lead time parts which is why we started there, but our motors, electronics, and power supply take a significant amount to produce as well. Those parts take around 30 days from when we place the order to when we receive the parts. We’re working with our suppliers for those parts to get production started as quickly as possible. We don’t have enough money to fully pay for those parts before the kickstarter ends, but we’re trying to reach deals with those factories to put down deposits to get production started.

We are in the News Again!

Well, kinda. We got a shout out on Hacker News and it was truly impressive to see all the thoughtful commentary the post created. It’s awesome to see folks in the comments section with a great understanding of the history of the project and how it works. Read it here. 

Accessories

Forum member @Devin_Draper is working on some awesome Maslow accessories. He’s got a z-axis touch probe to enable automatic tool length detection, a whole variety of drag knives, and a pen to convert your machine to a plotter. 

We haven’t tested them ourselves yet so we can’t testify based on personal experience, but the designs look awesome from what we can see. You can find them on etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/visualgraphicsdesign/?etsrc=sdt

Crow Skull Project

This week Anna completed the giant crow skull project and threw together a quick video on it! Check it out here:

Though we were originally intending to post this project for Halloween (how cool would that have been?), the Kickstarter release soon took precedence. Nevertheless, we want to showcase this project because it was an experiment in unconventional CNC materials. It’s made of coroplast, i.e. corrugated plastic, and zip ties. The video will go into more detail on what we discovered while working with the coroplast and the Maslow, but overall we deemed it a great success. 

While working with wood is certainly the Maslow’s bread and butter, it was great to see that it works well in another medium. As we have seen in the forums and in the update above, some Maslow users have fitted their machines with pencils or markers in order to draw with the Maslow, and someone even wants to try to cut cloth! Actually the drag knife above would be perfect for cutting coroplast. Whenever we experiment with a new material we will be sure to let you know how it goes.

We think that the crow skull is so awesome that we want to do a truly giant one out of really thin plywood. So keep an eye out!

Usually we make our project files public, but in this case we sourced the mask pattern from Kamui Cosplay. We’re going to share the ready to cut file with the original creator of the mask on Etsy so that if you want to make your own, the files should be ready to go soon. Here is the link to their shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1659659865/bird-skull-pattern-digital-download-pdf

Have a great week everyone, and for those of you in the Seattle area let’s hope the power comes back on soon!

-Bar and Anna