How not to use a drill press

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My friend Chris and I are making some tutorial videos on the use of some basic machine tools.  The photo shows just about everything I could think of that a person could do to endanger themselves while using a drill press.

 

To be very clear: THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SHOULD DRESS WHILE USING A DRILL PRESS OR OTHER MACHINE TOOLS.

 

I am intentionally doing a number of things wrong.

Known Safety Infractions

  • No safety glasses
  • Work piece is not clamped properly
  • Wearing a tie
  • Long sleeves not rolled up and out of the way
  • Long side of work piece is situated such that if the drill binds, it will swing into my torso, not the column.

I’m sure there’s something else I am doing wrong in the picture, but it escapes me at the moment.

The drill press was off when we took this photo.

 

 

New Camera!!

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I bought a new camera recently for a photography class that I am taking.  Below are some images I’ve shot with the camera, around UCSD, home, and my general day-to-day life.

Please email me if you would like the reuse them for any reason.

Grounding

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The importance of grounding is becoming more and more apparent to me as I progress through my schooling and projects.  I’d like to write a tutorial on grounding for beginners to help tame entry into a complex set of rules, theory, and practices.  Sadly, I don’t have time to do write a proper tutorial, so I’m going to put some links/references to other sites that have helped me, directly or indirectly learn about grounding, for the time being.

WordPress Updated

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I applied the WP 3.0.5 release tonight.  I am still updating my plug-ins.  I had to apply the update manually due to undetermined issues with my host’s system.  I’m rather annoyed by the problems, but I haven’t had time to formally troubleshoot the issue and file a trouble report with their help desk.

The Tape Monster

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I am leading a Micromouse Team for IEEE UCSD, and in trying to hack something together that would drive in a straight line, I ended up making a contrivance with a lot of tape holding it together.  I named it the Tape Monster, because it didn’t really work, and it looked horrible, compared to what I usually produce.

Now, it turns out that there is a preexisting Tape Monster, from before I joined the Micromouse Team in 2008, so my ‘creation’ is technically the Tape Monster mkII.  Fair enough, I guess.  Anyways, the robot has 4 Sharp GP2D120X sensors, an Arduino board, motor driver shield and a pair of DC motors with encoder feedback on them.  I wanted to power the thing from the USB port, but the cable bias was unacceptable, so I added some batteries.

Here’s where things get interesting.  Without encoder feedback based speed control, the value of Vin (feeding the H-bridges that drive the motor) matters.  The reason is that the higher Vin is, the PWM duty cycle required to overcome the parasitics of the motor is reduced.  Do I have equations a sexy graph for this?  No,  I wanted my robot to drive straight, NOW.  I would like to relate them, but that will have to wait for a night when I’m not under a massive time crunch.

You can follow the progress of my robot and see some of the data that I am using to drive my engineering and design decisions at the IEEE UCSD Wiki.

Now back to the regularly scheduled homework assignment….

“New” Jointer…

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A couple of days ago, I finally opened up the bench top jointer I bought about 9 months ago.  I assembled the machine and ran a few test cuts.  The last time I used a jointer was in high school wood shop on a couple of assignments.  I took a few minutes to read the operation section of the manual, particularly looking for the section with feed and speed type data.

I found a suitable piece of wood- two 3/8″ pieces of plywood glued together and  I set the depth of cut very shallow (on the order of 1/32″) and made a couple of passes until I had cleaned up the edge.  Admittedly, I could have cleaned up the edge in one shot with a 1/8″ depth of cut, but it being a new machine and that I was very much of practice, I decided a few light passes to get the feel of the machine would be better than a single heavy pass and risking break it or me.

The volume of chips the jointer made took me by surprise, since I’ve never seen a jointer without a dust collector firmly attached to it.

Pictures are here:

Chip Pile 1

Chip Pile 2

Frustration with Config Management Software

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At work, I’ve been entering cabling into Windchill, which is a PTC database tool for keeping track of BOMs, configurations, and other stuff.

The frustrating part with this system is that I can’t import cable runs sheets from Atlium, and apparently, it can’t import a BOM from a Pro-E (which is a PTC product) drawing or an Excel sheet.

I’m not sure if this is a problem with Windchill, or if it that no one at my company knows where documentation are for this feature is.

So far I’ve managed to find a few workarounds that are making the entire thing less painful, but still we have over 1000 cable runs to enter and we’re at about a minute per cable.  It’s better than about 3 minutes for one cable, but still annoying.