Ideally a hat should match the customers’ head size and shape. Obviously you can use a sewing tape measure to get the circumference of the head, but seeing that we are all unique flowers, we have been blessed with varied head shapes. Therefore, hat conformers are a thing.

They all work on a similar principle, multiple components that radially adjust to touch the head of the future hat bearer and lock into position. After that, the haberdasher can trace that outline onto whatever haberdashers trace their head outlines onto.

If you want to make your own, here are the files and instructions on how to assemble the thing:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1841312248/hat-conformer-laser-cutting-files-dxf

Parts list:

• 1 x Laser cut – Base – 4mm plywood
• 23 x Laser cut – Element A – 4mm plywood
• 23 x Laser cut – Element B – 4mm plywood
• 23 x Round headed M6x20mm bolts
• 23x M6 wing nuts
• 23 x M6 large washers
• 23 x 5mm shelf pins/pegs

Assembly

1. Use wood glue to assemble Element A to Element B
2. Insert 1 shelf peg into base
3. Place assembled Elements into base and insert bolt from below
4. Place washer on top of Elements and Wing nut on top
5. Repeat 22 more times
6. An elastic band should be used around the vertical elements to make conforming easier.

On an unrelated note, have you ever seen an actual banana hammock?

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Here are some pics of putting it together.

And fully loaded:

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I detailed this process in an earlier post here:

Laser Marking Steel – the dry moly lube way

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Layout. To get a feel for the size of hammock I needed for my bananas, I put up two clamps and moved them around until I felt good about myself. That never happened, but I stopped when I figured out the basic dimensions for the net, as in distance between tackles and the bow of the net.

I went on by searching online for a simple way of knitting or knotting a hammock net. Found that on this page. Ray Mears. Haven’t heard of him in a long time. Anyway, the basic idea is that you use some nails as a guide and zig-zag the rope from one side to the other of the net and make a knot at each nail. To do that, first I laser cut the spacers to keep the net open, and passed the rope through it and the screws in a zig-zag pattern. After finishing one row of knots, I just moved the net one position over and repeated the process.

When I was happy with the length of the net, I finished it up with another spacer, then tried it out on the clamps.

Excellent. Those bananas were already looking pretty relaxed. I then quickly whipped up a frame on the laser cutter. For the main part I used two 4mm plywood sheets glued together and for the feet just 4mm plywood.

Bonus gif of the engraving and relaxing:

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Design-wise the course I took was to use a lamp boom/arm and mount the fan on that, so it could be positioned as close to, or over the soldering job.

Half an hour of solidworks later, I had 3 laser cut parts. Two grills and a spacer consisting of 5 and 3mm acrylic to get to and 8mm space to accomodate 2 sheets of filter material. With the filter I went the only way I knew which was using an activated charcoal foam sheet which is sold for exhaust hoods. So I cut it out in the shape of the spacers.

Then I just dismantled the cheapest boom-arm lamp I could find and mounted the fan onto that. Of course it took me three tries to get the holes right. Tired, I guess.

All assembled, and waiting for a speed controller:

On to the speed controller. I briefly thought about using an Arduino to provide the PWM for the 4 wire fan I used, but then I realized I hadn’t used a really old friend in a long time. My good old buddy, the 555 timer. I found a schematic online to provide the high frequency PWM for 4 fire fans and built the schematic on a small perfboard after trying it out on the breadboard first. This way, I didn’t need any voltage regulators and I saved loads of space.

I’ve fallen in love with this lamp arm. It’s so cheap (around 5 euro) and versatile! I also built a microphone adapter for it, for a friend of mine.

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Started off by making a quick design in Solidworks, because all the components were to be printed or laser cut.

This was what I came up with. The bobbins of the ten coils to be 3d printed, and all other parts laser cut out of clear acrylic or two colour ABS. Thankfully I had some left over 1.5mm Black-Gold ABS which came in handy for the components in the middle of the reactor, because those were all black and gold. The center grill was cut out of silver and blue ABS. The ring and back plates were cut out of 5mm clear acrylic.

What is still missing from the design is a way to illuminate the middle of the reactor and also a housing. This is because I thought a NodeMCU would fit inside to maybe serve up a web page in order to control the LEDs or some fun functionality like that, so I didn’t want to rush it.

I then got started on cutting the acrylic parts. I didn’t have any frosted acrylic so I sanded it with 800 grit sandpaper and some WD-40. Worked like a charm:

On to assembly while the bobbins are printing:

I had to sand down the leds in order for them to fit into the 5mm acrylic base plate:

After that, I could start winding the coils. I didn’t count the number of turns because, well, you know…

I ran out of luck with the leds and only had 8 out of 10 I needed, but they were enough for the initial lighting test. PSA: Don’t use cyanoacrylate on transparent acrylic if you need it back-lit. It is noticeably more opaque.

I hope I’ll be able to continue this project soon, even though I’m really low on free time.

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The connecting rods and their screws were epoxied into the engine block. Not having a welder is a pain. He also had the idea of somehow attaching a fan he had laying around so that it would look more like a functional engine. A “couple” of tries later, and I had a laser cut bearing mount for the fan.

Here’s a GIF of it in action:

The next feature on the list was some interesting lighting. Luckily we found a cheap remote LED controller with a lot of patterns and brightness settings. It’s the small shrink tubed thing in the upper part of the picture on the left. We used a really small 12V power supply from the LED section in the hardware store.

To get a nice glowing effect from the cylinders I laser cut some MDF discs to fit inside, and glued some LED strip to them. Then glued some spacers to the MDF and over those I placed (not glued, so removable) white acrylic to disperse the light.

And here’s a GIF of the lighting in action:

And some more pictures in its final position:

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Edit: Bonus Ferric Chloride bubbling GIF:

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Laser cut with 0.1mm outside kerf compensation to get that “hammer” fit.

Added some cheap window gaskets:

Then I just cut two square shapes to hold the PVC sheets. Turns out this was a bad idea because of the way that plywood bends under heat.

The way I tried to heat up the plastic was with a cheap electric radiator and a hot air blower. The radiator didn’t have enough power to get the plastic soft enough and the blower wasn’t uniform enough and kept either not softening the plastic at all, or just completely melting it.

Anyway, this was my best attempt:

Gotta go buy me some of that fancy HIPS I guess. Maybe a more powerful heater too.

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