\n\t $\"Plexiglass$ <\/a>\n\t

Plexiglass graver organizer<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I got a little annoyed by this, and resolved to fix it.\u00a0 About a year ago.<\/p>\n

The fix was relatively straightforward: take a slab of plexiglass, drill a bunch of holes into it, and make a saddle so that the slab would stand upright on the back of my GraverMach, where I could both see it, (and the tools it contained) and was unlikely to set anything on top of it.\u00a0 (Not a trivial consideration around here.)<\/p>\n

The drawback was the simple annoyance of drilling a whole bunch of accurately spaced little holes.\u00a0 Not difficult, but a pain in the tail to lay out and drill.\u00a0 So I’d been putting it off.\u00a0 And then I met a friend who introduced me to his<\/strong> little friend….the laser cutter.<\/p>\n

Oh boy, I am enjoying this thing.\u00a0 Tom, many thanks, and I promise to stop abusing it sometime very soon.\u00a0 (For the record, and in all seriousness, Tom’s been a minor saint in putting up with me ‘clearing the decks’ of a variety of projects that had been floating around in my ‘to do’ list.\u00a0 For this, I do both humbly apologize, and publicly thank him.)<\/p>\n

So, the recipe is pretty simple:\u00a0 take a slab of 3\/8″ plexiglass, and drill a bunch of holes into it, make some tilted uprights to go on the back, and a little crosspiece to go across the back to give it something to stand up on, and away you go.<\/p>\n

I’m not including the laser pattern here because the one I used turned out not-quite-right.\u00a0 It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.\u00a0 The slab was 6″ tall, and about 6″ wide.\u00a0 The holes are .25″, and are .625″ apart, both vertically and horizontally.\u00a0 The rows are offset vertically by .375″, so that there is greater separation between tool bits as you reach into them.\u00a0 I could have packed them in tighter, but remember, you’re reaching into a small forest of razor blades to fish one out.\u00a0 Perhaps having them farther apart is a good thing, no?<\/p>\n

I measured the width of the top of the GraverMach with a ruler, and thought<\/strong><\/em> it was 5.25″ wide.\u00a0 It turns out it isn’t.\u00a0 It’s actually 5.175″ wide.\u00a0 The goal was to have a slip-fit of the side pieces down the side of the GraverMach, but with the bad measurement, there’s a little slop.\u00a0 Just what I deserve for assuming a measurement.\u00a0 Trust, but verify.\u00a0 Just because 5.25 makes sense to me<\/strong>, doesn’t mean it did to them.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t really matter, but the imprecision annoys me.\u00a0 There’s a little piece of 1\/8 plexi cut out of a different sheet that connects the two side pieces, to support them, and to give the slab a base to stand up on.<\/p>\n

In use, I’ve found that it’s best to take a deburring (or countersinking) bit, and chamfer both sides of the holes, so that the rubber ring that holds the QC shanks into the handpiece has an easy way to get started going through the plexi.\u00a0 If I had a very shallow angled bit, I’d use that on the rear sides of the holes.\u00a0 The rubber ring is 3\/8″ from the face of the QC shank, so that the rubber ring just clears the plexi on the back side when the tools are seated.\u00a0 This was the point of using 3\/8″ stock, and is a good thing, as it holds the bits securely.\u00a0 Unfortunately, it also makes it a little hard to get them to slide out smoothly.\u00a0 A long, shallow taper to the back side of the hole will (eventually) solve this problem.<\/p>\n

Another trick you will notice from the photograph is that the shanks themselves are painted in various colors.\u00a0 GRS has finally started making colored little plastic collars to slip over the tools, but unfortunately, they come coupled with the little round holders.\u00a0 As I’m not about to pay full freight for a bunch of little colored rings, I use paint pens.\u00a0 The paint pens don’t stick all that well, especially on tools that get used a lot, but they’re good enough.\u00a0 I’ve known some people to use colored dental rubber bands for the same function.\u00a0 If I had a source of those, I’d give it a whirl.\u00a0 The idea is pretty simple:\u00a0 green shanks are round bottomed, blues are knives, yellow are ongilettes and so on.\u00a0 Just makes it easier to tell at a glance which ones are which.\u00a0 All the knives are racked in the same vertical column, all the ongilettes in another, and so forth.<\/p>\n

This may or may not be of use to anyone, but feel free to take the idea and run with it.\u00a0 If you make money, I want 10%.\u00a0 Just saying.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I have a GraverMach power engraver.\u00a0 I also have a fair number of engraving tools for it.\u00a0 They all come in quick change mounts, which is great, except that the little round holders that GRS sells don’t organize them that well.\u00a0 They don’t really grip the shanks, and they tend to dump all the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/alberic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}