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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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Hardware

The belt was scavenged from something a while ago and the pulleys are laser cut acrylic. They both have the same number of teeth because the precision of the stepper motor and microstepping would be enough for the small diameters I would be working with.

A quick calculation shows:

A resolution of 1.8deg/step results in 200 steps/revolution. For a 10mm diameter stock, this equates to 31.4mm/200 = 0.157mm/step of surface displacement. With 1/16 microstepping factored in, you get 0.0098mm/step. The resolution I use to engrave is 0.06mm. So more than enough.

Having dismantled an old cordless drill a couple of months ago, I had the chuck and the original shaft of the gearbox. Luckily it had three prongs sticking out, which I used to mount the pulley on. Upon realizing I had no bearings of this size in stock, I went to the autoparts store next to my workshop (it was a late Saturday). Luckily, alternator bearings matched the shaft and they were cheap, too.

After using some DB9 connectors to easily exchange the motors for the Y axis, I was good to go.

Here’s what it looks like (I’ll upload some non-potato pictures when I get around to it):

Edit: Here are some more pictures:

It may not have been such a good idea to use plywood for this build but it is stiff enough for now.

IMPORTANT: Turn your laser cutter OFF completely when connecting/disconnecting stepper motors. Not doing this may damage your stepper drivers.

Software

On the software side of things, the only thing I had to do was enable “rotate engrave”. In this screenshot, the option is inactive. I’m not sure why, because on the workshop PC it’s active. In the workshop I have the original “Laser CNC” software that I received on the CD with the machine; on this laptop I’ve downloaded RDWorks 8.01.18 and the UI is a bit different, and the machine is not connected.

“Circle pulse” here, a bit obviously is the number of steps for a complete rotation.

Also, the end-stop for the axis which is replaced (for me it’s the Y axis) needs to be manually triggered twice during machine initialization.

Action!

Here’s a GIF of it working on it’s first project (write-up coming soon!):

Thanks for reading!

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It worked fine on these. I also marked my own Swiss Army Knife. The good news is, it worked. The bad news is, I chose a predominantly etched design, meaning that the laser had a lot of time to heat the blade up. This being the smaller type of knife, the blade is quite thin. Of course it warped… It does look good though.

Another thing to be mentioned is that this marking does not work on chromed or nickel plated surfaces. Tried it on a Zippo lighter and it left only the faintest mark. It may be because the plated surface isn’t porous enough.

Here’s a gif (horrible, horrible quality) of the action:

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Hopefully, in the future, I will be also able to sell some of the projects I make and they will be available in the Store section.

Feel free to check out my previous projects at:

solderchips.wordpress.com

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