Interest Check: Color Wheels for Vectrex 3D Imager

[TrekMD]

Very cool! Looks like your hard work is paying off!

[jasonbar]

Update:

- Hubs. After many dead ends & false starts trying to use makexyz.com to get plastic hubs 3D-printed locally & cheaply, I ended up taking my revised hub design back to shapeways.com. Rev A hubs are a go! Fit of square drive on the 3D Imager is just right. Easy to install & remove a color wheel (well, as easy as a stock wheel, which isn't all that easy...). Hubs are black & the "embossed" logo is keen.

- Wheels. Finally carved out time to wrap up the 8 drawings for the 8 unique color wheel wedges. Got the DXF layouts for the laser cutter, got the material all squared away, got a PO sent off to an art shop, just waiting on the quote & the chance to drop off the material.

Thanks,
-Jason

[TrekMD]

Excellent! Thanks for the update!

[jasonbar]

Happiness (& smelliness) is 428 laser cut color wheel wedges. That's enough parts to make 36 3D Minestorm & 24 Narrow Escape/Crazy Coaster wheels (with lots of certain parts leftover).

Further happiness is 5 good 3D printed hubs. 1 has been test-bonded to an earlier 1-piece disk. More can be printed easily as needed.


Unhappiness is the black parts that have retained some bend from the material being stored & shipped in a roll form instead of flat. For laser cutting, this material was double-sticky taped to the laser cutter bed. The clearance inside the 3D Imager is so tight that the black wedges need to be super flat to not rub when spinning.


Anybody know how to safely & cleanly flatten 80 little .020"-thick Delrin parts? Presumably by putting in the oven at X degrees for Y minutes between 2 clean & smooth metal plates...without contaminating the oven where we cook our food?


Thanks,
-Jason

Attachments:

[jasonbar]

More pics

Attachments:

[jasonbar]

More more pics

Attachments:

[50tbrd]

See if you can get an oven off freecycle.

[madtronix]

Wow you really put a lot of energy in that!

I guess the material is thermoplastic?
Laminate them with a paper laminator.
You may have bad luck (I had) with the cheapo laminators you can get for 10 EUR at the supermarket.
The more expensive ones (I use the ibico pouchmaster series, but the brand doesn't really matter) have the ability to set the temperature manually. you may have best results when running the black parts through the laminator between a folded piece of paper. when using without paper, make sure the plastic is heat tolerant. It's really a big mess cleaning off plastic from the heat transfer rolls in the laminator (yes tried all that:-))
You can give a cheapo laminator a first shot though, maybe you're lucky and it is hot enough)

Directly after the laminator put them in between some books, pieces of wood, etc. so they get flattened more. that works quite well for my wheels. but my imagers are quite tolerant it seems.

if it has to be really flat, propably order them again :-(

If you don't have a laminator nearby , send me one piece by post and I'll have a look at it.

Don't worry about contaminating the oven, there's more toxic stuff around in everyday life.

[VectorX]

Yikes, scary parting note there

[jasonbar]

A bump.

I've pinged several local plastics shops, tried a little ovening myself, & come up with no progress.

If anybody can aid me with flattening these black plastic semicircles, I'll be in business!

Thanks,
-Jason

[jasonbar]

Jan 5, 2014 15:49:56 GMT -5 madtronix said:

If you don't have a laminator nearby , send me one piece by post and I'll have a look at it.

Please PM me, Madtronix.

-Jason

[jasonbar]

OK, it's been over a year since I started this effort, & I don't see completion happening, so I'd like to ship this off to somebody else who wants to play with it & who can perhaps finish it for your own enjoyment or for the Vectrex community.

Remaining work: flatten black wheel parts, perfect a bonding system (which may require an extra support ring around the perimeter, if the wedges won't stay coplanar.

Contents:
- 8 stacks of opaque black, transparent red, transparent green, & transparent blue wedges to make the 2 color wheels
- 8 Remnant cutouts from the above, to use for bonding or flattening tests.
- A stack of laser cut clear plastic blank color wheels--maybe you can perfect a printing process instead of using multiple wedges?
- A handful of 3D printed plastic hubs.
- A couple of test assemblies.

I'll share all CAD models here on this forum, for everybody's enjoyment.

It's a 16"x13"x4", 5 pound box, shipping from USA 91103. I'd like the recipient to cover shipping costs. I've got hundreds of dollars & many many hours of my time invested, but I don't expect to recoup any of that.

Attachments:

[jasonbar]

Link to Dropbox folder with all documentation, CAD files, etc.: www.dropbox.com/s/z0oe8g1lozuwosm/Spinferno.zip

Contents are about 82MB unzipped, 63MB zipped.

I don't plan on keeping this content on my Dropbox folder for terribly long, so all interested parties should download ASAP, & I hope that somebody will want to host this material (or a trimmed, more relevant subset of it) permanently.

Thanks,
-Jason

[jasonbar]

This stuff gets dumped in the trash on July 1, if it is still unclaimed at that time.

Thanks,
-Jason

[VectorX]

What all is in the folder? Is it just photos? If so, it can be dumped into the Vectrex wiki. If there's stuff other than photos, then it can't take it, as Wikia wikis can only host photos, gifs, etc., it can't do soundfiles and the like.