Stretch Goal Update
about 11 years ago – Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:56:11 PM

Hi Folks, I mentioned some fancy options I'd like to get for the machine, which also (would you believe) cost a lot of money. A bunch of people commented, emailed, and messaged that I should add these to the campaign as stretch goals. 

I normally think of a stretch goal as something the Backers get, not the project creator, but I realized you will see the direct result, and that is me making higher quality parts, faster. I really want to fulfill on time at the level of quality I have promised. Adding lots of options and extra stuff to the campaign inhibits my ability to do this. We call it "scope creep" in the industry, and scope creep is a delivery killer. 

The challenge: 

I'm going to be making way more titanium pens than expected. Aluminum is "easy" to machine, titanium, not so much. It's both hard and stringy. 

• Hard material means a lot of cutting force, and consequently a lot of heat. This normally means you have to machine much, much slower, especially when drilling. It also ruins tools more quickly.  
• Stringy material is the machinist's worst enemy because the material tends to wad up on the tool and work and can cause a legitimate disaster. I might have to stop the machine, repeatedly, to clear stringy "swarf" while working a single part. 

The solutions: 

I love manufacturing because of the boundless ingenuity that goes into it. Get ready for some science...here's how me are going to machine a lot of Ti.

Stretch Goal #1 : 300 PSI High Pressure Coolant @ $75K Funding Level
Cost of feature - $6,900.00

300 PSI is six times the normal operating pressure for a coolant system. They also have 1000 PSI, but you really don't want to know how much that costs. Coolant is actually delivered through the drill, not just sprayed at the drill like in the photo above. This massive pressure cools the tool tip and blasts the "chips" backwards, away from the cut, and allows the drill to keep on drilling, instead of having to "peck" in and out of the hole to clear chips and allow coolant into the hole. The quality of this video is awful, but it shows a great comparison. 

Okay, if you aren't impressed, tell me exactly how you even make a 1/4" drill that has two tiny holes along it's entire length of 4 inches...stick with it a sec...I know, I cant figure it out either?! (no I haven't googled it) 

The second thing High Pressure Coolant can do is cause stringy material to break up into smaller pieces and fall away from the cut, instead of forming a giant "birds nest" on the part or tool. A birds nest sounds cute right? 

Check out this video that shows the difference in chip formation, with and without high pressure coolant. "Hopefully" this means I won't have to constantly stand by the machine, stop it, and clear chips away to prevent my machine from looking like the one above. 

Stretch Goal #2 : Haas Servo 300 Barfeed @ $100K Funding Level 

Cost of feature - $15,000.00

Okay, now that we don't have to baby sit the machine and stop it every couple of minutes, we can run parts, a lot of parts. Now the problem becomes how much material you can load into the machine and this is where the ServoBar 300 comes in. It's basically a (not very sexy) material loading robot. This means the machine can be making parts while I'm busy dealing with the parts being made!

Doesn't this all make it a little "too" easy?

If these two machine features make it sound easy to make parts, then feel free to stop by my shop some time. Machinists get sad when people say things like, "don't you just put a program in and the parts come out?" We wish.

Well, I don't want to strain anyone's attention span so I'll answer that question in my next update. My example: "you know, writing a novel is easy right? You just come up with an idea and write some words down?" 

Thanks for your support and please don't forget to share on facebook and all over the internets! 

Cheers,

Jason

Getting the lathe options dialed in!
about 11 years ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:13:41 PM

Hi awesome Backers! 

I spent the day at Selway Machine Tool talking with my salesman and their application engineers about the final options for our Haas ST10-Y. 

There are a couple of "Cadillac" options that I'd like to get if we can bump the funding up a bit! For example, the "high pressure coolant" option that costs about $7,000 and will help a lot in drilling the deep hole in titanium without burning up a lot of expensive tooling. 

On that note!...I noticed that there are over 500 backers (holy smokes!) and only 87 "likes" on the project page. Any chance you good people could head to the main project page and click that little Facebook "like" button, just under the left side of the video window? Everyone who does that gets a gold star and my humble thanks!

If you are inspired, don't be shy about tweeting, Reddit(ing?), or submitting a link to your favorite gear blog! 

Cheers,

Jason

Weight & Dimensions
about 11 years ago – Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:09:05 PM

Hello all! So exciting over the last few days! Pretty crazy really. I probably won't be able to say thanks to all of you enough times over the course of this :) 

Quite a few people have asked about weight and dimensions so here ya go. This will be added to the campaign page as well. 

Holy Schnikes Batman!
about 11 years ago – Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 10:07:26 AM

Wow. I've said that a few times in the last 36 hours. Thanks so much for all of your support! I'm not even sure what to say but I thought I should say something like, "Holy Schnikes Batman, thanks for funding this project in under 24 hours!" I woke up this morning to the screen shot below. I guess I better get to work on responding to emails and comments :)