Vectric Customer

First post so please excuse any mistakes.

Been using VCarvePro since just before christmas, mostly trying to do some signage with the occasional forray into other things. Attached should be a pic of the clock I'm making. The design is based on garys 2003 clock but modified so the geartrain is more compact vertically since my machine is not large enough to cut the suggested frame.

There's a few other pics of bit's an bob's here.

I've not got much experience with CNC and the associated software but I think that Vcarve is simply excellent from the point of view of flexibility and ease of use. The one feature I'd really like to see is a grid with snap functionality - although it's quite possible to get by without it.

Thats awesome! Good work!!


Jason

Very Very Cool man!

Welcome to the forums!

Very nice, how well does it work? What materials did you use?

Looks really good.

Jason

Phil wrote:Very nice, how well does it work? What materials did you use?

Thanks. Materials were plywood for the gears, some old bits of laminate flooring for the frame (very hard on the router bits), 6mm dowel for the pinnions and a bunch of 10mm bearings. I could use a good source of quality plywood in the uk if anyone knows one?

I've not yet had it working (although everything in the train moves quite readily with a bit of a pull on the drive gear) - there's a bit of work to do on the pendulum before I can set it running and debug it properly. I actually didn't mean to build it - I started off just wanting to make the escapement as a demonstration but got a bit carried away!

Awesome, that is something I have been tryong to get into for ages.

How did you cut the gears. I am having big problems getting anything like that to cut properly. Is it possible to post the crv file for one gear which would give me a good start to understanding how to go about cutting the others.

Thanks in advance
Roly

Roly wrote:Awesome, that is something I have been tryong to get into for ages.

How did you cut the gears. I am having big problems getting anything like that to cut properly. Is it possible to post the crv file for one gear which would give me a good start to understanding how to go about cutting the others.

Hi Roly,

There's a link in the original post to Gary's site with the design - there's a dxf file there with all the gears and PDF's explaining the construction in detail. It's well worth looking at the site - there's lot's of information there on making clocks. I'd post the crv but even though I've altered the design substantially, I'll email him first to ask permission.

What I did was import the DXF and scale all the parts to the size I wanted, which was basically governed by the smallest router bit I had available (I drew a circle of the bit size in VCarve to make sure the cutter could get far enough into the gears - especially the escapement wheel, to make a decent cut) and making sure the largest gear would fit on the bed of the machine. Each gear in the dxf needed some work - I used the join open vectors on the gears to sort out the fact that the dxf was a lot of separate lines. That gave me a good object to work with for setting up the toolpaths.

The key in getting the clock to run properly despite having scaled everything by some arbitary amount, is to keep the pendulum size the same. The geartrain is effectively designed to operate at a certain frequency which is governed by the pendulum length. So even if I scaled the thing down to be only a couple of inches wide - I'd still need a pendulum over 1m long! As it happens, I had to scale the gears up, since my smallest cutter size was 3.2mm.

I have to admit I didn't follow the pinnion design - using straight 6mm dowel throught. However, they are all mounted into metal bearings which should help keep the mass of the weights down.

Hope that's helpful!

Outstanding. You are insiring me. In your personal gallery, you have photos of a green wheeled contraption, that looks like it might be an encoder. Its titled "Steorn". What is it.

DavidCousins wrote:Outstanding. You are insiring me. In your personal gallery, you have photos of a green wheeled contraption, that looks like it might be an encoder. Its titled "Steorn". What is it.

Errrrr ...... well...... this one might be difficult to explain without looking like a complete loony ! Both the green thing and the MDF construction are test rigs for playing about and exploring magnetic interactions. 'Steorn' is an Irish company who claims to have invented a Perpetual Motion Machine. Now, I should say that I'm a big skeptic of their claims - basically I don't believe them. However, the detail of their claims is quite interesting and the way they are going about it is unlike the usual scams/hoaxes that are usually (ok, always) associated with such claims. While I don't believe them, I've no idea what they are really up to and neither it seems, does anyone else.

Bet you wish you hadn't asked .

Well did it work? I built a Perpetual Motion Machine to show at the conference. It doesn't work but it looks cool. Drives my wife nuts too, she can't figure out why I'd build something I knew wouldn't work.


Hey is that you roasting coffee beans?

dighsx wrote:Well did it work? I built a Perpetual Motion Machine to show at the conference. It doesn't work but it looks cool. Drives my wife nuts too, she can't figure out why I'd build something I knew wouldn't work.

LOL! No, it didn't work as a PMM but it was never meant to. It did work in that it helped me figure out construction techniques for building test rigs to measure a particular property of magnets - Sv or 'lag'. However, I need to build some electronics to measure RPM and eventually instantaneous speed before I can gather meaningful data.

Hey is that you roasting coffee beans?

Yes - good coffee is a bit of an obsession.

Roly wrote:Awesome, that is something I have been tryong to get into for ages.

How did you cut the gears. I am having big problems getting anything like that to cut properly. Is it possible to post the crv file for one gear which would give me a good start to understanding how to go about cutting the others.

Thanks in advance
Roly

Roly, here are some gears you can cut....

http://vectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php? ... ight=gears

Chuck

Here is everything I know about Steorn if anyone's interested.

I was the thread starter under my previous name...my new cnczone name is 'thkoutsidthebox'! I haven't had any time in the past few months since my reconnaissance of their premesis to do any more digging unfortunately.

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23629

Us Irish are an inventive lot!!

Well you have invented a lot but I don't think this is your best invention....