薬の飲み忘れ対策

世の中には色々なものが出回っている。

でも、実際にはどれも不完全に思える。「まだ飲んでないよ！」と警告を発するようなものでないと、飲み忘れは防げないからだ。そのようなものは市販されていないので、自作する他ないだろう。

なので、来季の冬にボルネオに長期滞在する間に、基本的なデザインだけを完成させる積もりだ。

使える電子部品はボルネオに居ても、幾らでもネットで参照できるし、コンドミの部屋で実際の部品を使って試作などすれば、テロリストが時限爆弾でも作っているのかと勘違いされるだろうから行わない。

そもそも、ボルネオに秋葉原があるとは、とても思えない。

で、デザイン諸元は以下のようになる。

1.　その日の晩の薬を小箱に入れてスイッチを押して置く。
2.　その行為が内部の電子回路を活性化させる。
3.　夜、箱を開けて薬を飲み、電子回路を不活性化しないで放置したままにしておくと、寝室の電気が消えた事を感知して、ＬＥＤランプが点滅し始め、更に音声で警告を発する。

これならば、比較的簡単に回路の設計が出来るだろうし、コストも恐らく数百円で済むと思う。箱は無垢のクルミなどで作るのが正解だろう。精密蝶番を手に入れる必要がある。

New set of hashies, walnut and beech

Earlier lot has been gaining more and more specular reflection as coating continues, as shown above.

Yesterday's materials were planed today, cut into individual pieces and sanded into tapered pieces as shown below successively.






These pieces are here before being sanded into into tapers. They were cut using the mini table saw I talked about earlier.




Tapered beech pieces. Notice that heat induced dark blotches have completely disappeared from beech pieces.



Walnut pieces on top. Once you get to this stage of tapered pieces it is not too time consuming to turn them into their final shape. You only need to lose a small amount of material from the edges.

First of the serious attempts at the snack beds is shown below. I will need to complete 5 of these to form a gift set. I need to complete this task before setting off to Denpasar next month.



I am aware that I have not carried a movie about arc welding. I intend to do just that with wheels and a 12mm axis, as shown below. I have a smasher with two wheels, but it is very heavy and I could easily do with another two wheels.

My intention is to weld this 12mm soft iron rod to the bottom of my smasher and then further weld two nuts as the wheel stopper, nearer the body, that is.

Table saw, mini

Coating of current lot is in steady progress, as you see below. Snack beds have been sufficiently coated and they are no longer subjected to my coating scheme.



These are under (surface) protective coating and within a week or so they will go mat.

Today's topic is the table saw that I use. It is a mini. Blade diameter is something like 10cm. Normal table saw will measure something like 30 cm in diameter. They are monsters. They also sound like monsters in operation. I hate table saws. I really do, too dangerous to my liking.

That is why I only use a mini table saw. Anyway, the point of this article is its use. I very rarely use it for normal cuttings. Rather, I use it for making grooves, prior to cutting along the grooveline with my band saw.



There are advantages. The groove can be made more or less exactly parallel to the fence on the table and therefore act as the guide line for band saw cutting. Also, since the material to be cut is already grooved on both sides cutting by the band saw will be so much easier.

The grooves are cut to three different depths, increasingly deeper, each time at something like 3 mm to reduce burden on the motor.

I spent a fair amount of time today, cutting materials for a new set of hashes, as you see per below.





These will be planed tomorrow, I hope. I also made a progress with my new set of snack beds. There is no photo for this.

Where I stand at the moment

The photos I took of the shelves with my pieces on, most were blurred. So, I carry only one here.



Actually, there is another one here. This item is a mini Christmas tree I made late last year. It is an LED lit metal rose, imitating petals. These metal petals and the bras stem were precision welded, using oxygen and gaseous propane. My design was such that the illumination provided colour changes.



Coating continues with wet sanding as you see here again.



My polyurathane coating uses a simple brush, hand-made. It is a small piece of cotton on a stick, and yet it is very effective. I can coat large areas with this small brush as you see below.





These are waiting to be coated again (and again, and again...) by this small brush. When wrapped up around the stick (with a rubber band) my brush looks like this one below.



It is a throw away brush, does not cost you anything. Mind you, even the cheapest proper brush from a 100 yen shop will set you back by at least 100 yen.

Anyway, I concentrated myself today on hashi making and welding of a rose arch for my garden. I could not spend any time on the jigs. They were simply neglected like you see below.



This was the first of my serious attempts at hashi making (utility hashies, at 33cm in length). A starting material is seen here. It has been planed, forming a tapered piece, waiting to be disected.



Upon disection they look like,



At this stage, they are square shaped in cross section at any point all the way down the length.

When one of a pair has been sanded down they look like,



I think you can see the difference. Cross-sectionwise they look like,



They were coated immediately as next three pairs are in the pipe line.



I had some time left to spend on snack beds. These have been planed and sanded, ready to be cut out and then cut to 45 degrees.



The last photo for today is the rose arch. Soft iron bars and meshes were arc welded.



I think I will have to explain how easily (?) you can do it. That will have to be a separate article, though. Arc welding of this kind is somewhat different from bat welding of band saws and I am sure there are many who would like to do it themselves.

I will be using a movie and close up photos about important issues and elements in arc welding so that the whole thing becomes very easy for anybody, including even house wives. I will also talk about safety precautions.

Fresh set of snack beds

It is not that nothing has been taking place. Take a look at the following photo.



A new set of materials are being set up, trying to fabricate another 20 or so snack beds. Actually, I will be buying more walnut to cope with the potential demand.

This time round I will be in for more precise fabrication and that means more precise "chigiri" cutting and that in turn means more robust cutting jig. Up until now, I have been trying every avenue, trying to cut down on the number of jig parts changing.

I have now given up my hope in that area and in its stead I am going for two base plates arrangement. Using a single base plate and rotating an aluminum holder is too complicated, mainly due to the interference from the milling machine column.

So, two separate base plates, as you see below. Can you see that aluminum pieces are perpendicular to each other?




and next one is simulation with my actual cutting disc in place. Here, it is.



Coating of previous lot has been going on. Each bed is subjected to 10 times of wet sanding, as you see here below.



I am quite a bit obsessed with elaborate coating. Normally, even those products sold at department stores are rarely coated more than 5 times. In my case it is 10 times. Yes, I am a perfectionist. It is just one of those things.



In the meantime, though, different things are being made. In particular, infant feeders. Here are some examples. These two will be given to my friends.




Above are at various stages of fabrication.

On another front, show room arrangements for my products are under way at the furniture making factory. I will carry some photos of this tomorrow.

Not much today, really

I welded half a dozen new band saw blades and one tangible result from it is the cutting right down the middle of an irregular shaped long block of wood. The photo is here, below.



This is probably oak, and if not, I will then turn this block into 50 or more pairs of hashies. Snack bed fabrication continues, but it is now rather becoming mopping up operation with failed pieces. See below.





I will have to start working on a new set of beds for distribution. Polyurethane coating is continuing behind all this. I will also have to make a few spoons for babies...

chigiri cutting jig

I am still at it.

Having, I think, made a usable jig I am still at it. There are two reasons for this.

One is a simple reason of wanting to cut through a plate in one go, as is shown in the following movie. Here, I am trying to make a simple incision in a simple, vertical plate.




This plate stands perpendicular to the milling machine column, and therefore the rotating disc is moving, except for its translational motion along the plate surface in order to change its cutting edge trajectory, at the right angle to this imaginary perpendicular line.

Given that the plate is only 10 mm in thickness this motion ensures that the surface cut across and again perpendicular to the plate surface is flat to all intents and purposes.

Another reason for still dwelling on this jig is the need for better visibility of corner cutting process. I need to be able to see both sides of the corner at the same time as the cutting disc moves along.





In order to achieve that I need to optimize the angle and even the lateral position of the supporting aluminum plate, by trial and error. It is taking time.

For that matter, even my 45 degrees cutting jig has had its fair amount of tragedy, as indicated by the next photos.





Some were cut to disaster levels and were being discarded as shown in the first photo. Some ended up being cut shorter than intended length. The second photo is showing that.

Altogether, only 4 out of original 10 plates have survived the ordeal. Too many casualties and I think I will have to produce another set of 10 pieces, before distribution is ever contemplated...

On the other hand I have had a degree of satisfaction with my planing jig. Next three images should suffice to bear that out.







The first one indicates uneven planing, but it is largely due to the narrowness of the starting material, which is barely good for sawing out one pair of hashies. Working with a wider material should solve this problem.

As you can see in the second image it is a testimony to what plan I had in mind. No heat generation and clear tapering, after half a dozen planings each side. The final image is the pointing and thinning end of the material. Two auxiliary lines can be seen. Planing is reaching very close to them and that is very good, indeed...

Hashi planing jig

Due to a minor leg injury I had to go to my hospital today and I was not able to achieve what I intended to do. The little I was able to achieve included welding of 5 new bandsaw blades. In this I was helped a lot by the web entry I had made in October 2014, I think.

On return from the hospital I set out to construct the pusher/planer angle jig and that is shown below. The metal part is not yet fixed, but it is almost there. The aluminum part is 1 mm thick. It represents 10 % of the thickest portion of my hashies and in that respect it is not exactly infinitesimally small in thickness.



My gut feeling now is that I should not plane all the way up to this metal. If I stop planing 15 mm in front of it my planing depth at that point should be infinitesimally small, both in theory and practice. I can then easily sand down that line of inflexion on my belt sander.

Next photo shows the forward end stopper. It is merely a piece of wood, fixed on the plane bed with a J clump, and its position can be changed easily.



I have not yet used this setup and I will do so tomorrow. On the sanding front, there was a unexpected discovery. It is a holding jig which originally came with the belt sander I am using now. There is a disk sanding arrangement, as you can see in this photo.



My 45 degree faces will only need light sanding to remove saw traces. I ordered sanding discs and I will be using this a lot in future. Up until now, I have been using the main belt sander for everything, and sometimes I found it to be too abrasive.

My new sanding discs will be Velcro fixed, so should be loaded lightly just as I intend to do...
On other fronts there are things going on, but they are all under control.