As a basis I used some kind of surgical clamp bought at the flea market a long time ago. I kept it around just waiting for an opportunity. Well, here it is. There was also a bit of 10mm flat stock in the workshop and used that to make the actual grabbing part.

After finding an appropriate diameter steel disc, I bent the flat bar around it, then used the wire bending jig I built a while back to bend back the ends of the circular sections.

Then I cut the end off of the surgical thing and drilled and tapped two holes for each tong. Of course I broke a tap in the process so had to drill another hole. So much for symmetry.

After a couple of matte black high temp spray paint, the tongs are done.

Here it is being tested out. Works great, and the built-in spring prevents you from dropping the flask.

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Having some left over plywood from another project, I went ahead and built a wall easel. With french cleats, mind you.

The build

Installed

Check out my instagram for more process shots: https://www.instagram.com/istimat.g00/

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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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