The Shop Day

... and how it turns into two weeks

So, originally it was supposed to be the shop day. I was gonna clean and put together the compressor I picked up off a gentleman on Craigslist, and set up the air hoses, filters and such - and then, back to CAD. And then..

See, I was looking for a bandsaw. I wasn't in a rush, so I was gonna pick up a good used one; so I was watching Craigslist and such, waiting and waiting. After doing that for about 6 months and after I got tired of not having one; I finally said "screw it" and bid on one on Ebay.

I won it on Friday around 4pm; paid, and went home. Well; there, in my Gmail's Inbox, was a notification from CraigWatcher saying that yet another bandsaw ad was posted... I opened it up; and couldn't believe my eyes.

Someone was selling.. an 18 inch Grizzly saw for 250 bucks! I couldn't pass on it; and next morning was driving back with a 300 pound beast in the back of my car....

... and then, spent a week and a half cleaning it up. I polished the rust out of the table; changed some bearings, re-cut threads on the blade tensioning rod, added a 4 inch dust port (for whatever weird reason, Grizzly decided not to put a dust port on this particular model).

It also ran on the 220, so I had to add a 220 outlet to the shop... Decided to go all out; and added a 6 gauge run with 50 amp breaker, so that I can run a TIG welder off of it when I get one.

So now; I own two bandsaws :).

Here's the perpetrator:

The Bandsaw

Since we're talking shop....

Right now Im set up in the garage of the old house we bought about half a year ago. Dash (my beautiful wife) is working on designing a new house we're gonna build; and that one is going to have a good sized shop. We will build that house first and then demo the old house; so I could start setting up earlier than I thought I would be able to; which is certainly nice.

But; Im dealing with 40 year old electrical; and other fun stuff..

Here are some pictures of that garage, ordered historically, as I was setting up.

Just after washing everything with a pressure washer...

The beginnings of the storage spot

.. all that empty space :)

That's pretty much all my tools before I moved (the big red chest is new)

First batch of stuff - table saw, jointer, planer, drill press. Excited!

.. and set up!

Storage's getting a bit more crowded

Setting up lighting. All that wood is for the benches.

First bench - the frame is ready.

The benches are up - and this place is starting to look like a shop!

.. yep

Next, some 2x4s put together into a material rack. Cleared a lot of space!

Storage again

Air setup, router table, and The Bandsaw

Added some entertainment :) Also, the little Delta bandsaw on the bench

I like how this looks!

And here are a couple pictures of the tools...

Air setup is very simple, a compressor with a shutoff directly into an air filter, regulator, and 25 feet of hose on a reel. That reaches pretty much everywhere.

The Air Setup (very simple for now)

At some point; I measured the runout on the drill press -- got around 10 thousandths - no wonder why it was all vibrating when drilling deep holes!

Grizzly includes very cheap chucks and arbors with their presses... Gladly, the bearings have no play though. I ended up picking up a used Jacobs chuck on Ebay, and boy, what a world of difference! Used a SouthBend arbor picked up on Amazon.

The Jacobs Chuck

I wanted a router table; but didn't want to pay around a grand for the one I like (and cheap ones are just.. crap, honestly); so I built one.

Top is two sheets of 3/4 MDF, laminated together. White Formica is laminated on top, bottom, and sides. All done with DAP Weldwood contact cement.

I bought the insert plate (though in hindsight, I should've just bought a hunk of aluminum and made it myself).

It still ended up being a bit out-of-flat, so I built a leveling system into the base (two bolts on each side are pulling the top "down", screwing into holes in the top with threaded inserts; and there are two screws pushing up on the top in the center of each long frame side. All that allows me to work out any non-flatness out of the top.

Fence is 3/4 ply; and the router sits in the box under the table. The box has 4 inch dust fitting epoxied on it on the other side (and the fence dust collector feeds into that fitting too).

The Homebuilt Router Table.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all of them yourself.

Bellcrank and Idler

Bending and twisting virtual metal

It's almost 5 am and Im finally done with the bellcrank alignment! Phew.

By the way, sheet metal stuff in Solid Works is amazing! You give it the bend lines, radii, and a couple more parameters; and it automatically creates both the bent item; as well as the flat pattern. Print the pattern, glue, and start bending -- it will show you which line, how many degrees, and in which direction to bend. Ill post one of those final drawings later, when I get around to printing them and bending some actual metal :).

Anyway...

The night started quite jolly with me whipping out the idler arm with it's bracket. Looks pretty neat, eh?

Aileron Idler Arm and Bracket

And then, back to the bellcrank hell. I had it modeled back in the days, and the "jog" bend 1/2 inches down made. Here's how busy the sketch with all the radii and holes looks BTW; pre-bending.

Bellcrank layout

Anyway, with all the sheet metal awesomeness SolidWorks doesn't know how to twist. You can twist a model by using deformation, but at that point all kinds of shenanigans begin to happen. For example, all faces of the model stop being planar faces (meaning nothing can be sketched on them, and sketch is how you start defining a feature (part of the model)); for some reason I wasn't able to put a reference point into the center of one of the holes, etc. (I ended up drawing that point finally by projecting that hole's centerline onto one of the faces; that did work for whatever the weird reason Solid Works gods must have).

Bellcrank, bent and twisted

And after fiddling with it for about an hour, I was finally able to position everything. The plans don't specify where the bracket should be, so my educated and logical (yes, mr. Spock?) guess was that it should be so that the aileron pushrod connecting bellcrank to the alieron hinge is aligned and straight in the "aileron neutral" position. So I used the aileron hinge center as the reference; squared the bellcrank and aligned it that way. Note the blue line (that's actually a plane bisecting the aileron hinge), and the Point1 (that's that wretched point on the twisted surface that took me so long to figure out). That's what I used for alignment.

Bellcrank mated and aligned with aileron hinge

Coming up, putting in the idler, all the pushrods, and checking clearances with rib truss throughout the full range of motion. I strongly suspect that I will need the control stick's model on the fuse to do that, since that's what the other end of that pushrod attaches to. Oh man... gotta love those dependencies. That just means that I will have to do that model earlier than planned. Oh well. I like Solid Works anyways...

Tomorrow's the Shop Day! Gotta clean and put that compressor together.

OK 5:11 AM; time to go get some sleep :)

A helicopter is a collection of rotating parts going round and round and reciprocating parts going up and down - all of them trying to become random in motion.

Aileron-To-Rib - Alignment

Fixed mis-alignment in ailerons

Today, got only about an hour and a half for CADing. Re-opened my Lower Wing model, 50% thru or so, and started remembering things and checking things around.

I was right at a point when I hung the ailerons on the wings, and this time was re-checking the alignment again, only to find that they were off! Looked like they were lower than the rest of the wing ribs, by about 1/16th. Clearly visible on the screenshot below.

Black lines are aileron outline, orange lines are wing ribs

Started digging around and re-checking the hinges, holes, etc, with plans. The 'spar' side hinges are the most complex ones, and they were fine.. When checking the aileron assembly though, noticed this, which struck me as odd (and a bit illogical):

Aileron hinge sticking a bit 'above' the spar

Notice it sticking up? 3/32nds! Close to 1/16th. Arguably, there will be the filler there, but it still seems illogical (yes, mr Spock? :) ).

Anyways, moving the spar attach holes on the hinge up by 1/16ths (plans call for 3/8ths between the top of the hinge and the top hole center), so 5/16ths it is. That moved the whole aileron up on the hinge, and therefore, relative to the wing, and voila - a perfect match!

Match!

Yay! A perfect match.

Now, I know that in reality I will be drilling holes in spars in place based on the pilots in the hinges (or the other way around, hinges based on holes in spars (damn.. Im yet to decide.. :) ); but I'd rather start 'clean'.

"Approach, SWA436, you want us to turn right to 090?"
"No, I want your brother to turn. Just do it and don't argue."
-ORD ATC

B-Log, The Nerd's Builder's Log

How I went about b-logging

Note: this article was updated in 2018 to reflect changes I did in version 2 of B-Log. I want to have a single article to link to in case people are interested...

Notes on the update are here.

/project-one/section-one/

        2001-01-01-entry-one/
                    entry-one.rst
                    picture.jpg

        section-one-log.log

/project-one/section-two/

        2001-01-02-entry-two/
                    entry-two.rst
                    picture.jpg

        section-two-log.log

/project-two/section-one/

        2002-01-01-entry-one/
                    entry-one.rst
                    picture.jpg

/project-two/section-two/

        2002-01-02-entry-two/
                    entry-two.rst
                    picture.jpg

2011-01-01 | Some Summary Here       | 1.02
2011-01-02 | Some Other Summary Here | 2.02

Rule one: No matter what else happens, fly the airplane.

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