Between 265 & 485 SQ/FT Grumblebums Corner

[nicholam77]

Great to see some posts again, GB. Your vanity turned out fantastic. I used a water-based poly on my maple vanity, and it's held up great. Aside from a lot of wood movement. As long as you wipe up any standing water from the sink, I think you'll be good.

The pergola and deck look awesome, I'd love something like that. And the pizza looks delicious. My wife wants a pizza oven but we've had pretty good results with a gas grill. Now I'm hungry.

Good call on the PAX units. Maybe I'm just tired of doing cabinets lately but sometimes IKEA just makes sense...

Keep the updates coming!

 

[hewey]

Grumblebum, great to see you pop in again. How are you coping down your with all of this rain?

The deck/gazebo/bbq set up looks a million bucks, great improvement and looks like it would be a lot more useable space too. Nice work!

 

[Grumblebum]

Thanks for sharing the pictures, and your work!
That pizza is calling my name!

Thanks Jon, I need to get back over and catch up on your happenings too.

Good to see you back, GB. How old is your son now? I have to say I'm jealous of his box. It's nicer than any of mine.

Kirk he is 10 now. Yeah it's a nice box, until I joined the journal here I can't claim to have know much about the roller boxes.

Good to see you back, a lot of very nice work there.

Thanks Geoff.

Great to see some posts again, GB. Your vanity turned out fantastic. I used a water-based poly on my maple vanity, and it's held up great. Aside from a lot of wood movement. As long as you wipe up any standing water from the sink, I think you'll be good.

The pergola and deck look awesome, I'd love something like that. And the pizza looks delicious. My wife wants a pizza oven but we've had pretty good results with a gas grill. Now I'm hungry.

Good call on the PAX units. Maybe I'm just tired of doing cabinets lately but sometimes IKEA just makes sense...

Keep the updates coming!

Cheers Nick, I'm trying to get the mojo going again.

Grumblebum, great to see you pop in again. How are you coping down your with all of this rain?

The deck/gazebo/bbq set up looks a million bucks, great improvement and looks like it would be a lot more useable space too. Nice work!

Hey Hewey, wowzers it's been wet. I think where I am we dodged a lot of it somehow with only a couple hundred mm over the period. We had those back-to-back east coast lows as a kicker too. Even just down the road in Wollongong was more than twice what we got here. Everything has been pretty wet and the follow up rain we keep getting just makes it all soggy again.

I've still got a few days work to wrap up out the back, but until this wet weather buggers off not much is going to happen.

3D printing fun...

At my day job office we have a Geeetech A30 Pro 3D printer. It’s been largely sitting unused as it’s main purpose to date was printing parts for the boss’s motorhome (which he has since sold) and the odd raspberry pi case etc.

I’ve been giving it a workout over the last couple of weeks after spending a bit of time dialling in the bed levelling and learning a bit more. I think this has been a deterrent when things fail to print properly you just don’t want to have to muck around with it.

This was Nicks influence printing some plunge saw track holders.

Spent a bit of time working through getting the bed manually re-levelled, then worked out how the auto-level function works on this unit. The first one or two holders went well then I started to get some lifting. Started to work out why that was happening and learnt about “raft” and “brim” adhesion settings - heaps better. Raft adhesion pretty much prints several “raft” layers, then prints the job. This is very nice apart from the substantial additional print time and the difficulty that follows removing the raft from the printed object which I was unable to do. Next I tried a “brim” adhesion layer which is just a little extra around the outside like the brim of a hat to help keep it stuck down. This worked very well so that Is what I stuck with.

Lost a few hours amongst that too as I thought a firmware update would help. That sucked and I thought I’d bricked the machine to the point where I ended up ordering a new board and LCD controller module from geeetech. Luckily after a some google foo I sorted that out. Worked out that the software had nominated the printer model to to be an A30 not the A30 pro which is a different board from what I can tell and hence the wrong firmware applied.

Anyway this is starting with the raft print base. I was pretty happy with the layers going down though.



Changed to brim adhesion and no more issues.



So the design is such that the swivel part that locks the rail in is meant to “break” around it’s pivot point but I was only able to get a couple to do this. The rest ended up snapping off. Since the pivot was about 8mm I drilled it out with my little bench drill press so it could take an M8 bolt. The bottom side I drilled out with a 13mm bit just enough to accept a nut (I just eyeballed the depth) and to pull the nut in I just inserted a bolt with a washer and tightened it up.



Printed 8 of these all up, I have 2 of the 1400mm rails and the big boy 3000mm rail, not sure if it needs 4 brackets but that’s what I catered for that one. My only issue now is finding the wall surface area to mount them



I’ll apply some loc-tite to the bolt so that it sits in the nut without moving allowing the locking mechanism to swivel as it needs.

These each took about 4hours 25 mins to print with the brim adhesion and the model was taken from thingiverse.

I've got a few more posts to write so will try to get them done over the next few evenings.

Cheers GB.

 

[Grumblebum]

Just one more quick post since I had the photos uploaded...

Going back probably a couple of months, my rear left tyre was dropping pressure to the order of about 20 psi a week (I run them at 40). Figured I had some form of slow leak. Anyway when I did the oil change and subsequent 5k tyre rotation, I found I’d picked up this little nugget somewhere along the way.





It gave me a chance to try out this kit that I’ve had for a good few years now that always lives in the truck. Worked great.



Tyre was holding pressure a few days later still so I called it a win.

GB

 

[Trapps]

...My only issue now is finding the wall surface area to mount them

Is the ceiling an option?

 

[xtremek]

Nice job on the printer stuff. I still haven't loaded the software on my laptop to be able to use ours.

 

[Grumblebum]

Is the ceiling an option?

Trapps that's actually not a bad idea, I was always wanting to utilize the garage ceiling space, but had planned on swapping out the stupid overhead door opener with one of the liftmaster 8500 style ones to clear up the space, I need to circle back to that

Nice job on the printer stuff. I still haven't loaded the software on my laptop to be able to use ours.

You are too busy out in the weeds (pun intended) Kirk. I've been giving that printer a work out testing some sortimo boxes, and today found a mount for the Makita battery charges to wall mount them. You'll get to yours when you can. I even have managed to get subscribed to the free for personal use Fusion 360 product that @nicholam77 and @Bakafish have been talking about to play with. I'm not coming from a CAD background so will see if I can start to model my own prints for bit's-n-bobs - there may be some youtube learning time involved.

Another thing I made in the last couple of weeks were a set of parallel guides using the 3D printer. The 4’ rails I had already purchased a while back to be used with my saw carts that I keep harping on about but haven’t yet started building (hopefully soon )

I don’t have any T-Nuts so I printed some of those too, they take a flatter M6 nut and worked pretty well. Luckily I had some in one of those random nut and bolts sets that you see in the big box stores from time-to-time. The rest of the hardware is stainless M5 20 mm bolts and M6 16 mm bolts, I also used a couple of washers just to make sure the bolts weren’t driving into the bottom of the T-Track or the Makita rail when tightened up.





As a test out I needed to rip off a lip on the back of some Ikea PAX wardrobe units (these were the 8’ versions I had in our now ensuite area originally but are being moved to our daughters room). The backing panel I’ll be just using solid 16mm melamine particle board instead of the flimsy 3mm rubbish that they come with from the factory.




The rail insert part goes in nut side down…



And the tee assembly then bolts through to this, I do need to remove some sharp edges from the printing due to the brim adhesion I’ve been using.



Since these panels are all pretty much identical from the factory, I was able to just set the rail spinterguard against the edge that I needed and then set the parallel guide stops. Technically they weren’t really needed for this exercise, but I had to try them out.









At 4’ the rails are too long. They are flimsy when you need to move the rail off to pull the cut work out, but I don’t want to cut them until I get a feel of what a good length would be - but having just had a think about it, the Makita rails are 184-185 mm wide to the splinter edge, so even if I cut 1 rail in half that is probably more than long enough for most cuts. That would save a rail to go towards the saw carts/router tables too.

Cheers GB.

 

[Denwood]

Very nice additions to your Makita track setup! I see you have a dust deputy on yours as well....

How are the track connectors you made faring with respect to break strength? You guys have me itching to get back into the (affordable) 3D printer world. I purchased an Alaris 3D printer for business about 10 years back with a cost of over $50K. It also drank UV cured monomer model and support fluid at about $600/litre. What you guys are doing now is pretty awesome with far less expensive kit.

 

[nicholam77]

Nice job on the 3D printed parts! Those rail holders are the same model that broke my printer haha ! I could never get the breakaway "print in place" mechanism to work, it always snapped. Good workaround on drilling it out.

I gave up and ordered the FastCap holders instead, but later I found this model on Thingiverse which looks better in my opinion. Too late now that you've already printed a bunch but just an FYI.

I use some 3D printed parallel guides with Incra TT+ track, and my T-Tracks are 24". Add that to the guide rail and I've found it's been enough for most cabinetry operations.

I even have managed to get subscribed to the free for personal use Fusion 360 product that @nicholam77 and @Bakafish have been talking about to play with. I'm not coming from a CAD background so will see if I can start to model my own prints for bit's-n-bobs - there may be some youtube learning time involved.

Nice. I have no CAD background either. I've found it challenging, but even if you end up scraping the surface you should be able to design some basic items, which is cool! It's slow-paced, but this series on YouTube helped me a lot and was much more digestible than a lot out there. Covers the "basics" with a lot of repetition so you actually learn.

These were also kind of eye-opening to me (and he's even Australian!):

Keep it up!

 

[xtremek]

Just curious, for someone who uses and abuses their tools, what material would you use to print socket rails?