Week 5/25 - 5/29

It has been extra short this week. To start off on Monday there was no school because of Memorial Day. Then on Tuesday the seniors had their last day in the shop so we had a pizza party to celebrate them.

That being said I was able to get some work done on Wednesday and Thursday. Tim decided to take over tapping and chamfering the holes on the rear end cap as well as getting rid of excess stock. This game me room to start working on the front end cap. The progress has been a bit slow on that though. I let Andrew use the mill first as he hadn't used it before and I was helping him to face the stock he needs for his keyboard. Once he was finished I got the stock for the front end cap on the mill and started to face it. Mr. L noticed a problem when facing that might have also been a problem when making the rear end cap. Because the end cap is resting on two points in the center when clamped down it makes it possible for the stock to wobble during drilling or facing operations. For the facing portion of the front end cap I just tightened it as much as possible and it seemed to work okay giving the stock a nice finish. I will address this problem when actually going to drill holes and find some way to support the two ends that aren't directly pressed in the vice.

Now that I faced both sides I was able to get a measurement for both the height and diameter of the stock which I can model in Fusion so I can start making programs. I hope to finish these over the weekend so I can come in Monday ready to get straight to drilling and milling. If all goes well the end cap should be finished by the end of next week. The O-rings meant for the grooves also came in this week so Tim and I were testing to make sure they fit perfectly. The rings kept popping out unfortunately just because of how stretched they are so Tim is going to use the lathe to go a little bit deeper. For the original dimensions the work I did was nearly perfect. When measuring the groove Tim said I managed to get the distance within 0.0005 inches of what he had put in his design. To put that into perspective that is about two times thinner than a single strand of human hair.