Wood Shop Buyout

 This weekend I bought out a woodworking shop. It wasn't planned. I just sort of happened. Someone Desi knows told her he couldn't work any more because of his health and needed some money for medical bills. He produced a list of his tools and Desi brought it home to me. Thanks to Zim and his truck, I was able to go out Saturday and take the whole lot off his hands.

I paid $1,750 for the whole bit, which is too much, but it was for a good cause. By my guess I would have paid $2,370 for all those tools new. Some of the tools are decidedly not new. The old table saw and sand paper of dubious value notwithstanding, I paid 80% of what it would have cost in a raid on Lowe's.

So, now I have a nearly complete woodworking studio. The highlights are: table saw, 3 routers, rotary cutter, jig saw, joiner, miter saw, and compressor with nail and staple guns. I have a complete inventory drawn up. To finish it off I would probably need a planer, drill press, band saw, and lathe.

Printing Colbert is Hard

This is supposed to be the bust of Stephen Colbert, but it kind of reminds me of that scene from Total Recall. Travesty, both the movie and the print.

I've been troubled by this issue from the start. All my big prints have failed in similar fashion, most regrettably the Makerbot plates for Mendel parts. Small prints are no trouble. It seems happen most during the travel phase of the print, as it moves any long distance without extrusion. I've tried a lot of things, including slowing the entire print, travel and all, down to a crawl.

The famous Art of Failure article describes this problem as an issue with insufficient current. I've been playing with the current on the motors a lot. I turn them up until they stutter from too much juice, and I can't seem to make any headway.

I have to solve this, though, because students are going to want to print some largish things.

3D Printing Web Site - Open3DP

Al pointed me to an interesting web site today, Open3DP. I think I may have seen it before, but it's worth taking note of here so I'm glad to revisit it. The top article today is about a new book from the same people who wrote the Build Your Own CNC Machine.

What 3D Printers Are Good For

A lot of times I'm asked what 3D printers are good for, as in, why would someone want a 3D printer besides the cool factor. Xnaron on YouTube posted a project update for an antenna tracker, his own creation, and all the structural components for the machine are printed on his RepRap. There's a lot of innovation going on here, and 3D printers enable makers to make more complex and intricate designs than they might otherwise be able to fabricate.

Intro to Digital Illustration at KIA

In the Summer semester at KIA I also want to teach the Intro to Digital Illustration class I taught last year. I've modified the the course description a little bit to hopefully bring more people in.

Intro to Digital Illustration 

Prerequisite: Basic Drawing Class or equivalent experience 

An introduction to fine art on the computer desktop. In this class students will learn to create illustrations for print and digital display on the computer using Adobe Illustrator. Scalable vector graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator take advantage of computing technology to produce beautiful images with a graphic style, at any size. This class provides students practical instruction in the basic use of the features of the Adobe Illustrator program. Students will apply their knowledge of art theory to create original art suitable for printing and framing. Students will have the opportunity to print  their best illustration to keep.  

Materials: I buy a box of paper $50, and it uses ink for the Epson printer.