A simple worktable with 2 pieces of routed 3/4" 7-ply birch plywood, glued together to form a 1-1/2" work top. The legs will be made from welded 1-1/2" 14ga square steel tubing.

A portable band saw was used to cut 8 feet .5" x 1.25" 304SS bar stock into 23 ~4" segments for the bottle opener. It took a while to located a portable band saw that was made in a free country and luckily Japan still produces one. A 10tpi bi-metal blade from McMaster works great with the Makita portable bandsaw at its lowest speed setting.

A two way solenoid valve was installed to control the opening and closing of the Royal 5C pneumatic collet closer with machine M code. Inside the Haas TL-2 control cabinet there are a few spare M-relays that can be used.

For the M-relay, the user has the option to choose between a normally open or normally closed circuit. A normally open circuit was chosen. The solenoid has a similar logic and a when de-energized, the solenoid default state will close the 5C chuck.

In the original configuration, the foot pedal actuates a two way valve that will open and close the chuck. That opening and closing fucntion has been taken over by the solenoid valve. However, a roller lever switch was added to the foot control pedal, wired in parallel to the M-code relay. This restores the opening and closing function to the foot pedal.

Way covers on X, Y, and Z axis removed.

Close up of the rails and ball screw

The baby TIG welder has arrived and a tig cart is being drawn using OpenSCAD with py2scad.

Miller Diversion 180 is a great portable (230V/120V) budget entry level air cooled tig welder. It's relatively inexpensive, comes with a 3 year warranty, and is Made in the USA!

For more information, Miller has a few videos explaining the Diversion 180 tig welder on their youtube channel.

The much delayed vacuum table for the Haas SR-100 is finally completed. The vacuum table is piped to the Travaini TRVM40-200 oil ring vacuum pump via 2" pvc piping. With all the valves closed, vacuum gauge shows ~29" of Hg so the pvc piping seem to be fairly air tight. The next crucial test will be the spoil board test.

After 8 yeas of use, the 35W laser cartridge on the ULS M300 laser engraver finally ran out of steam. The symptom was the rapid lose of laser power after a couple minute of vector cutting. Luckily, the fix was a simple swapping of the laser cartridge.

Clockwise from the upper left hand corner. The arrival of the laser cartridge. The laser cartridge. The back of the laser engrave with the old laser cartridge removed. Installation of the new laser cartridge. No tools were needed and the whole process too less than 5 minutes.

A short video on the test cutting with the new laser cartridge.

Finally, Haas SR-100 cnc router is up and running. The machine was manufactured in September 2009, installed in November 2009, setup by Haas in August 2010, and finally up and running in April 2011. It took a long while, but at last, it's up and running. . . well, the vacuum table is um. . . Anyway, the SR-100 is up and running.

Because the SR-100 will be fed a steady diet of wood and foam board, a dust collector is a must. The Oneida V-3000 cyclone dust collector arrived in late January 2010. The assembly process was fairly straight forward.

The first task was to make a new MDF table. It's a simple process involving counter boring 45 screw holes. The SR-100 and V3000 combination was perfect, but the same cannot be said for the programmer. . .

With the installation of the Royal 5C Pneumatic Collet Closer, the Haas TL2 cnc tool room lathe with the optional 3500rpm spindle is officially operational. The installation of the collet closer was fairly straight forward. The hardest part was removing the existing 8" 3 Jaw chuck.

Boxes from Royal Products arrives.


Royal pneumatic closer installed, with foot pedal actuator.


Close up of the pneumatic cylinder. The idea for the collet closer stabilizer was from Mark Hockett on cnczone.com.


Close up of the 5c collet Closer.