Repurposed Pen Box

I was making a box to store some lighting-related stuff. The idea was to cut foam inlays for the box to hold the bits. I was actually working on this box concurrently with my recent gaming accessory box, and so it was part of the same batch of experiments (such as using the same batch of resin for the inlay). However I somehow made a mistake when programming the G-code and only made it 3cm deep instead of the intended 5cm deep, and I didn't even realise it until I was cutting the foam. So I decided to use it to store some of my nicer pens that don't have their own proper box instead.

From left: Noodler's Konrad Dixie No. 10 Methuselah, FPR Himalaya green ebonite, FPR Himalaya amethyst purple acrylic, Parker 51, Omas 361, Pilot Elite, Lamy Scribble, Aurora 98 Archivi Storici, Rotring Esprit retractable graphite, Pilot Decimo dark grey.

I was using the leftover 20mm foam from when I made a foam insert for a statue. I thought it would be cool to have a protective piece of foam actually attached to the lid rather than have one sit on top of the contents, so I inlet a large pocket inside the lid. Unfortunately the plywood I was using was just over 5mm thick, and with the resin inlay on the outside I was afraid to cut out too much incase the lid became too flimsy, so I only cut the pocket for the foam to a little under 3mm deep. Which is quite thin, but still probably enough foam to protect the contents?

I glued in a sheet of foam, and then trimmed it flush on my hot wire cutter.

Since the box interior was 30mm deep and I was using 20mm thick foam, I had to actually slice one piece in half, down to around 10mm thick, to make up the 30mm thickness. This would be the bottom piece. I did this by sandwitching it between two pieces of wood, marking the line I wanted to cut, standing the wood-foam-wood sandwitch on it's side, and carefully running it along the fence on the hot wire table while trying to keep it upright so the wire would cut a consistent thickness.

I found that the foam insert in the lid actually catches slightly on the foam inside the box, creating resistance to closing. In fact the lid tends to "bounce back" after closing, leaving it open by a few mm. It can be rather hard to get it to fully close. Initially this was MUCH worse; it was hard to close at all and impossible to get it to stay completely closed. But I cut the inner piece of foam a bit lower and now it's much better, but still annoying. I'm not sure what the best solution is, perhaps I can find a way to cut the lid insert to be slightly thinner than the recess, or I just need to cut the body inserts to a bit lower.

I printed a template for the cutouts for the main piece of foam. I cut the inner pieces out of the template, then pinned the template to the foam with tailor pins.

I then cut out the pieces of foam on my wire cutter. This was a little fiddly as I had left very little material for the walls, so the whole block lost it's structural strength very quickly, making it harder to manouver across the wire cutting table.

I probably got too greedy and tried to fit in too many pens. The wood is also probably too thin, and annoyingly the lid is slightly bowed out - I really want to use solid, stabilized wood in the future, but that's a lot of work and I'm not really set up to process wood properly. Well, overall this box came out OK and it's nice to have a better storage solution for some of my pens.

Improved Game Accessory Box

My last attempt at a gaming accessory box for Warmachine worked fine for the cards, but it was very inconvenient when it came to the gaming tokens - at least in the amount that I carry around for Warmachine. After checking my carrier box I decided I had room to make a larger version that could organize everything better. I couldn't increase the height if I wanted it to fit in my case, but I could increase the width and depth. So I designed a new double-sided box; this would allow me to store cards on one side yet still have a large, shallow area for storing and organizing tokens on the other.

On one side I have enough room to store 3" cloud templates (up to five of the acrylic ones I'm using; I don't think WMH uses the larger 4" and 5" templates anymore) and still have several compartments left over in my 3D-printed divider for dice, tokens, pens, etc. I think I could even fit a small measuring tape in the middle, if I could find a good one. The other side has four compartments, each large enough for around fifty game cards in Dragonshield sleeves. Of course they can also be used for more tokens if needed.

This box took me longer to make than I had hoped. Double-sided boxes are something I've been having trouble getting dialed in, likewise partitions have been proving tricky. My first attempt actually didn't quite go together right, and the box glued up wonky. So I went back and modified my code, double-checking pretty much every aspect of the sizing and tolerances. I also changed my workflow to focus on accuracy (at the cost of a great deal of speed; this box took many hours to mill).

Previously I've been using a 3mm compression bit, and cutting through the entire stock in one pass. This is very fast, but I was getting some deflection. So this time I tried a 1.5mm bit (single-flute upcut as that's what I had) and used multiple very shallow passes; this gave me much better dimensional accuracy (and also meant I could use dogbones without them being nearly as noticeable), but took much, much longer. I also broke the 1.5mm bit, but that turned out to be because a connector for my spindle power cable was crap; it's only a few years old but the plastic had become brittle and the retaining tabs had snapped off. I noticed this and taped the connector ends together, but the tape apparently decided it couldn't be bothered to do its job and just kind peeled off partway through a cut, allowing the cable connector parts to separate and leaving the machine trying to drag a non-spinning bit through the plywood.

Speaking of plywood, I'm not too happy with the quality of what I'm using right now. Lots of voids in the middle, and it all splinters very easily, the box finish getting damaged during assembly and sanding (in a way that feels like it shouldn't be happening). This was especially true of the box lid "runners", the tongues and grooves that hold the box lids in place. So to try to reinforce them, I added varnish first, before sanding to fit. I actually tried to apply the varnish and then put them in a vacuum pot to draw the varnish deeper into the wood, but I don't think that really did anything. Regardless, I think the varnish helped to reduce the damage to the tongues and grooves when making the second box.

I wasn't too happy with some of my other materials either. My old wood glue had turned weird and yellow, so I threw it out and bought some new wood glue from the local hardware store, but this stuff... feels different. It's labelled HP Gold Synthetic Resin Adhesive, and it doesn't feel like the PVA wood glues I'm used to; it doesn't spread very well for example, and I feel like it might be setting more quickly. It worked, but the difficulty I was having spreading it might have been compounding the issues I've been having with box glue-up.

You see, applying glue to the correct places on all the sides and partitions was taking so long that the glue would start to harden before I was done, and pieces would end up setting slightly out of place. So for my second attempt at this box I tried applying glue to just two pieces at a time, then quickly assembling the box parts and applying pressure so that the two pieces would set in the correct positions. Once they were set I would take everything apart, apply glue to two more pieces, and repeat the process. This again took a long time, but I feel it worked better. I do need a better clamping solution though; my clamps are too big, elastic bands actually work better than clamps for smaller boxes but the ones I have are too small for this box.

I did think the resin inlays worked much better this time than in my last attempts. I started by applying a very generous coating of Coprabel's Easy Color wood stain varnish in Palissander 506 into the inlay to seal the wood. It's the varnish I used for the finish on my previous game box; I hoped the very dark colour would create a sort of blackline around the actual resin. After giving this a day to set, I applied a clear varnish (National Protective Coatings synthetic varnish clear) to the entire top of the lid. This was to avoid the issue I had with the previous box, where sanding the resin inlay flat created a coloured dust that settled into the wood top and refused to come out, leaving it looking slightly pink. I also wanted to wet-sand the resin as I've found it to be MUCH nicer than dry sanding (at least for resin), and hoped the varnish would protect the wood from the water.

When all the varnish was dry I applied the resin. I used gold Art Nation mica powder in ResinVentures Art Resin. The Art Resin has proven to be very vulnerable to yellowing, but I didn't feel that mattered in this case, and the mica powder worked much better than my previous attempts at using dyes or GSW metal powders. Being able to use a vacuum chamber (a relatively recent aquisition) to reduce the amount of bubbles in the resin also helped. Of course I passed a heat gun over the surface to pop the rest of the bubbles too; I think the heat gun moving the resin around also helped create a more organic looking pattern.

After giving the resin three days to fully set, I tried sanding the inlay using wet/dry sandpaper in a 3D-printed sanding block. While most of the clear varnish actually got sanded off the wood, and a fair bit of water soaking into the unvarnished wood on the other side, overall it still mostly worked out OK; I didn't notice any real warping of the wood or discolouration from the resin dust. The dark outline came out very nicely too, I'm quite happy with that. I did a quick polishing pass with a Dremel tool and Dremel polishing kit/compound. This did deepen the gold colour a bit and give it a bit more shine, but the wet sanding had already given the resin quite a nice smooth surface so the polishing wasn't too important in this case (I think I used a rather finer grit of sandpaper than I needed to for the initial sanding). Besides, there was still another varnish layer that was going to go over the resin, so the polish was too early (I didn't end up polishing again as it didn't seem to do enough to be worth it to me - especially when the rest of the box ended up looking a little bit rough anyway).

With the box assembled I started the final sanding (dry) to smooth everything out. Once this was done I coated the outside of the box with the clear varnish (applied by brush) and left it for a couple of days. This varnish was not very even; some areas felt very smooth, while others had a rough wooden feel. They actually felt rougher than they had after sanding, as if the varnish had lifted the wood fibres. So I applied another coat, then after giving that a couple of days to dry gave the whole box a very wet sanding. This evened out the surface a bit and actually gave it back a bit of the textured wooden feel, which I was happy about. However in some areas, where I felt the need to sand a bit more heavily as there were some thicker spots of varnish on the surface, I ran into some issues where the varnish didn't sand very well; it almost seemed to gloop up like an almost-dry PVA glue. Perhaps the water, and heat from the friction of sanding, was affecting it?

There were also some spots where the varnish didn't soak into the wood properly, perhaps because of my clumsy use of the wood glue earlier. These spots show up as pale spots and look pretty bad. Overall the final finish is not great, I actually think my previous box came out looking and feeling a bit better. The stained Coprabel varnish was much more expensive than the clear National "synthetic" varnish, so material quality might be a factor. I also dry-sanded that one much more heavily compared to the light wet-sanding I gave this box (to try to get rid of the excessive staining), creating an aged look and a more natural raw wood feel than the varnished look and feel of the new box.

Oh well, maybe the next one will be better. I want to try working with solid wood rather than plywood; I'm also hoping to eventually try using stabilized wood, which should be stronger and not require varnish. Fingers crossed.

A Prototype Deck Vault With Accessory Compartment

This design actually predates the gaming accessory box I posted earlier. It was intended for card games that use dice and tokens, like MtG. It would in theory work for games like Warmachine, but I think the accessory compartment is a little small as Warmachine requires rather a lot of tokens.

It is of course a double-topped design. I engraved a hand of cards on one lid and a dice on the other, to mark the different compartments. The accessory compartment is designed to be large enough for 16mm dice.

This was a prototype; you can see that I used dogbones for the box joints. For a "production" piece I would manually cut the pockets square so there won't be any holes. You can see that the resin inlays in the engravings did not come out very well; I've improved my technique since then, although I still need more practice.

I was using metal powder in two-part epoxy resin; despite my efforts to seal the wood first, some of the resin still seeped into the wood and dropped below the surface. Funnily enough those are the parts that look better; I mixed GSW metal powder into the resin, and it looks pretty good most places where the surface was not disturbed, but not where I sanded the resin flush with the wood, even after polishing with a dremel polishing bit and compound. I also tried to mix alcohol ink into the resin on the card deck symbol, to try to progressively change the colours of the cards, but that didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped. Since then I have obtained some coloured mica powders that seem to give better results.

One issue I'm having is splintering around the lid grooves. This might be partly caused by the quality of the plywood, but it is a bit of a delicate area. For this box I applied superglue to the tongues and grooves of the lids to try to strengthen them and prevent splintering (followed by some sanding to adjust the fit), and you can see where some of that glue got away from me and spread out across the surface. The box was not varnished; hopefully varnish will work to strengthen the tongues and grooves, removing the need for superglue.

I've been planning to take these to the local gaming spot and see if people are interested in having their own boxes customized with their own engraving etc, however I really want to make the final boxes from nice wood, not plywood, and that's surprisingly hard to get around here in appropriately sized sheets - at least with my current budget.

A Partitioned Gaming Box

The card box that I was using to hold my Warmachine cards couldn't hold any more, and I couldn't make it any deeper as it wouldn't fit into the accessory tray in my Warmachine transport case if I did. So I designed a partitioned box to hold two stacks of cards instead. I also added a third partion that was wide enough to hold dice and just long enough to hold my marker pen, with enough space left over for some tokens. The lid was also recessed slightly to serve as a tray; the idea was that I would hold the cards in place with my hand and dump all the tokens and dice onto the lid-tray.

I tried a new varnish and varnishing techniques; the varnish was brushed onto the body normally but airbrushed heavily onto the lid. It kinda looked quite green, so I sanded the body and lid lightly to reduce the tinting. The result wasn't what I was going for but it's kind of an interesting "aged" look. The box itself is fine, but that narrow rear compartment is awkward and doesn't have enough room for all the tokens and accessories I like to bring with me for Warmachine. I've decided that I have enough room to extend the rear compartment, so I might make another one in the future with more room. We'll see.

Guilt-Free CNC!

I've had a lot of ideas for things to do with my CNC router. But I've been reluctant to do much with it as it's quite noisy, and I don't want to disturb the neighbors. What I needed was an enclosure that would drop the decibels down to a civilised level. For a while I was trying to come up with a design that would not only hold the router, but also a vacuum connected to the dust boot so the machine could run clean and it would all be nice and quiet.

But that was a very ambitious idea; too ambitious, and to be honest just not really neccessary: a simpler enclosure would contain the dust and I could just vacuum it up after each job was done. So I finally settled on a more realistic plan: a simple wooden frame with acrylic walls. A yoga mat along the base would provide a seal and reduce noise being transmitted through the table, and I could pass the cables through a cut in the mat and under the enclosure so I wouldn't need any special sockets or anything. It took me far longer than it should have (it's been a weird year...), but that's exactly what I (eventually) made:

Cutting the acrylic was a job. Originally I tried various cutting bits on my dremel tool, but none of them worked all that well and I actually broke a dremel tool in the process. In the end I used a hobby scriber that I modified to be able to cut deeply enough to get through the thick acrylic; I found this cut much more cleanly than any of the power tools, and it was easier to get a straight cut with it.

With the acrylic cut to shape I could start work on the frame. But for some reason the wood I bought for the frame was warped. I don't think I bought it that way; it seems to have happened in the time I left it sitting around? Which to be fair was quite a long time, but it still surprised me. Well, I did the best I could and figured it wasn't the end of the world if the sides of the box were not 100% straight.

Once everything was cut and drilled and ready to be assembled, I... ran out of screws. I had bought a pack of 125 wood screws, which seemed a strange number but proved to be a couple of dozen screws short. And wouldn't you know it, when I went back for another pack they only had a slightly different type of screw (in a different colour), and only in packs of 250. While it strangely bothers me to have two different colours of screw, I didn't want to put the project on hold for something so silly.

When putting it all together I found the easiest way of dealing with the enclosure was to leave the side of the table empty, and simply tip the enclosure onto it's side to gain access to the router. However this meant the control box and laptop couldn't sit there, so I had to put the control box underneath the table. Which was a little fiddly as the cables were a little short and didn't give me much leeway. But I managed to make it work.

Finally it was time to cut something. Crossing my fingers, I started it up. And wouldn't you know it, it worked! The noise was a lot lower than before, low enough that I doubt my neighbors can hear it now.

And the fruits of my labour:

Only one small mistake (the grooves in the base aren't long enough), and it's my fault, not the machine's! The new straight-flute bit seems to be cutting well enough, and I've made a lot of improvements to my GCode-writing scripts, so... yeah, I'm feeling pretty happy today.

A bit of light CNC

While I quite like the cards that come with many miniature games these days, you do need somewhere to put them. So with every new game you pick up, you need a new card box. Why spend a few seconds ordering one online, when you can spend weeks making one yourself on a noisy and dirty CNC mill?

I downloaded the Marcher Worlds and ISA logos, cleaned them up in Gimp, then imported them in Invetables' free Easel software to generate the gcode. There's a couple of small issues with the Marcher Worlds logo, but I figured it was good enough. The ISA logo still needs some work though.

After milling out, gluing up, and sanding it down, the box was looking pretty good. Like with my MTG box I decided to airbrush on a stain/varnish. I didn't really like the colour of the varnish I had used last time though, so this time I decided to try using Army Painter's Strong Tone instead - I'm pretty sure it's basically the same stuff as normal wood stain and varnish.

I wanted to go a bit farther with this one, so I ordered some glow in the dark powders from GreenStuffWorld and, along with their UV resin, tried to fill in the logo. Their Glow Pigments 2432 - Space Blue looked very close to the colour of the logo on the Marcher Worlds box, although it looked darker when mixed with the resin. After some dithering I decided to try for a steel/silver look for the outer logo details and, after some experimentation, settled on mixing a bit of Vallejo 1.063 Model Air Metallic Silver into resin for those parts.

I modified a pair of eyedropper bottles with thin metal tubes to give me a syringe-like ability to pour the resin, and used them to try to cleanly fill in the milled out logo. After pouring and curing the resin, I tried to sand the logo flat; I was hoping I could do this without taking the stain off the wood, but alas. So at that point I decided to just sand all the varnish off again - or almost all - and leave it at that.

Even though the final result is not too bad, I do feel that a lot of things went wrong. I broke like four 1mm mill bits while working on the logos. The main mill bit used to cut the box was probably a tiny bit oversized, so the pieces ended up fitting together a bit loosely. The wood wasn't very high quality and I need to apply filler in some gaps in the inner layers that were revealed by the milling. I didn't do a good job with the wood glue, leaving gaps in some places while excess glue sunk into the wood in others and interfered with the stain. I used a rotary tool during the cleanup, and took off too much material in a few places, leaving blemishes that I couldn't sand out. Applying the stain/varnish before the resin was a mistake, as I ended up needing to sand after that anyway. Some small bit of wood were dislodged when cutting the logo, which I didn't register until the resin flowed into them, ruining the logo slightly (you can see the mistakes around the nose area). Also when pouring the resin, I felt as though it was getting absorbed into the wood, as I kept pouring it level and yet the level kept going down when I looked again a moment later. So I ended up deliberately pouring too much, leading to a lot of overspill, and quickly applying UV light to cure the resin before it could be absorbed. The results were messing and required a lot of sanding work, which ended up sanding off the stained wood around the logo. Also in my tests the resin didn't cure if I added too much silver paint, so I added as little as possible when applying to the logo, and I don't know if I just didn't add enough or something else went wrong because the final results don't look very metallic. I probably could have added more glow powder too; that might have made the glow effect stronger? Finally the sanding left the resin with a rough scratchy looking surface despite my efforts to clean it up with a finer grit sandpaper at the end.

In the future I will use a separate stain and varnish, which I will apply after the resin; this will allow me to wipe the stain off the resin areas then apply a varnish to the whole box. Or more likely I won't use a varnish at all. And I'll probably treat any areas I want to pour resin into with a brushed on varnish or something first to seal them so that the resin can't be absorbed. Also I don't think I'll use glow in the dark pigments in the resin; I like the idea in general but I don't think it really does very much on a card box. Naturally I will also try to be more careful when gluing and sanding. I expect to be needing another card box soon, hopefully I'll do a better job on that one.

A Magic Box

This is a box that I CNC-ed earlier this year. It was intended to hold my red/blue starter Magic The Gathering deck. Which I used once before deciding I couldn't be bothered to get into Magic.

So it sat for a while, assembled but unused. Eventually I decided to use it to test some ideas, so I painted in the logos (Citadel Glaze Guilliman Blue and Bloodletter), then airbrushed on a wood staing/varnish, lightly sanding once dry. Which worked surprisingly well, so that was nice.

I had issues with the mill bit being slightly out of spec leading to loose fitting parts, and I screwed up the positioning of the logos just a little bit . Still, I'm quite happy with the result, although the woodstain turned out more yellow that I expected - I would have preferred a more reddish-brown. Ah well.

Crudely Consolidating CNC Components

For a while now I've been running my CNC machine off a very messy setup, with spread out components and nasty wiring. I've been working on pulling everything together into a single control box; not only would that be neater and more convenient, it would also increase my machine's capabilities by allowing me to wire in some additional components. Well, due to various problems it ended up taking a very long time, but it's finally done... mostly.

It was designed to contain a BeagleBone Black wireless, but I've been having a rough time getting that set up, so I haven't actually put that in yet; for now it has to be wired directly to a computer. But the idea is that the monitor on the front runs off the BeagleBone, which connects to the USB port (mainly for loading memory sticks as I planned to run it off bluetooth peripherals).

On the front, there's a bunch of air holes; these have air filter foam pressed on from behind by 3D printed grills, so the inside of the machine should stay relatively dust free. The left red switch is for the spindle, which runs off a 48V power supply and is controlled by PWM speed controller, and a second is for a similar setup (24V power supply and speed controller) that I wanted to use to power a fan motor. The spindle controller is wired into the TinyG, so using the selector I can switch between manual and software control. I don't think the TinyG can control two PWM boards, so the fan is currently manual control only. The E-Stop button isn't wired up yet as I haven't decided on the best way to do it.

Around back we have the power switch to the whole shebang. Underneath it is an HDMI port and mini USB port for the BeagleBone, and a printer port for the TinyG. Above the extractor fan vents are a couple of holes I'm planning on using to attach a small square of cloth that will hang over the vents to prevent dust from getting in while the fan is off. On the other side of the fan are four ports for the four stepper motor controllers on the TinyG, two ports for the spindle and fan, and then four smaller ports, currently unused, which I am hoping to use someday for wiring up limit switches. Someday.

As I'm sure is obvious by now, it's not actually done yet. The whole thing is only screwed together and not glued though, so I can take it apart to make changes, additions or replacements. It already works better than my old setup ever did though; in fact I already used it to cut out something new. A mounting plate for the articulated hose that I wanted to run off the 24V fan:

I 3D printed the mounting bracket and screwed the whole thing in place, and so far it's looking good:

I'm really happy that the whole thing has finally come together. Yes, there's more work to do, but it can wait; I want to actually work on some projects right now that aren't just more add-ons for the machine itself. What a novelty that would be!

A New Helicopter Landing Pad

I just finished milling a new spoilboard for my CNC mill. This one has some extra features:

The central cutouts allow me to easily attach my 4th axis in proper alignment.

The slots allow me to clamp down smaller pieces of material without removing the board.

It's just simple piece of wood, but it still took a bit of effort measuring, planning, and scripting, since it needed to be very precise.

The next thing I want to work on is attaching an air jet (or whatever you call it). So far my every attempt to cut plastics (which I need for a number of projects) has ended up with a glob of plastic melted and bonded to the bit before I could get very far, even when I use single-flute bits. I'm hoping that having a jet of air blowing onto the bit will help disperse chips and keep the bit cool, allowing me to work with plastics.

The thing is, I might need to build myself a new controller box first, just to house all the components (things are a bit of a mess right now). I've been putting it off for a while, partly because I wanted to build a Beaglebone Black into the box but I couldn't get the BBBlack working properly. Seriously, if there's a trick to getting support with that thing, I don't know what it is. Every tutorial I tried to follow failed, and no-one answered me on the official forums.

Anyway, I've decided to put the BBBlack on hold, and build a controller box in such a way that I can run it directly off my laptop for now, but that I will be able to install another controller (like a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi or whatever) later. It's a bit fiddly, but I think it should be doable.

This bed is too small

I wanted to build a bed extension for my CNC machine. First of all, this would allow me to move the clamps a little bit farther back, giving me slightly more practical working area. Second, it would theoretically allow me to use the CNC machine a little like a pillar drill, since the milling head can actually extend slightly beyond the end of the aluminium bed.

After carefully measuring the CNC machine, I designed the bed extension to bolt onto the end plate, making sure to allow for the existing screws etc. In order to bolt it on I drilled two holes through the end plate, using the existing grooves to help me maintain a consistent height.

Now that I could take the final measurements (to make sure I wasn't off on the position of the holes I had cut), I generated the g-code and milled it out. I used my new 90 degree V-bit to cut the large grooves.

Finally I bolted the first plate to the machine, and the second plate to the first. This way I could grip something between the two like a vice. It all fit together quite well.

I haven't actually tested it yet; but of course I can always cut a new one if needs be. The only real issue that I see is that the mill head might not extend far to use it the way I would like; I believe it would be possible to extend the distance that the mill head can reach if I was willing to dissassemble the machine and take some material off from the beam the crosses under the bed, but I really don't want to have to do that, so fingers crossed that I won't need to.