In terms of being a documentarian, I seem to be having one of those weeks in which all of my forward push is transferred directly to a wheel I'm standing within. Bit pieces for the CNC project have been trickling in, I dug through the aluminium scrap heap at Coyote Steel last Friday and procured some C channel that will comprise my gantry. Before posting about that, however, I'd like to have some sort of 3D rendering/CAD cut-sheet of my gantry to accompany what would otherwise be a dull picture of a pile of metal.

This is where I'm reminded that my passions do in fact not lie in the realm of twisting software around to my needs and flexing my digital muscles. Shame that, since I'm morally locked into the Linux philosophy, which requires that I think for myself (ie: fit together digital puzzles) once in a while. So this morning I've installed wine so I can have another go at Google Sketchup, which as I recall has a nice and soft learning curve. We'll see if my mild apprehension in getting nested software to run is warranted. Then I'll be able to bang out a proper CNC update with eye candy.

Also, on the machinist front (remind me to self apply that label only AFTER I am pulling finished work out of the mill), I picked up a Mitutoyo digital caliper over the weekend, which will help me immensely in committing the correct dimensions to the drawings I'm about to draft.


For the record, these knobs are in fact different sizes.

And, so as not to rob ourselves of the pleasure of looking at guts, here's an internal shot of a Leader Electronics Corp. LCG-388 Color Bar Pattern Generator. Hailing from the days in which a television was repairable (I'll let you do the math on that). Given the compact nature of the unit I fully expected to see some ICs in there but no.. THIS:


Discrete transistors, germanium diodes and a lot of the letter "3".