Sunday night gearhead special.
Imagine that you have spent more than a year rebuilding a 1940’s era milling machine.
It is Sunday night, and you are FINALLY putting it back together again.
Everything is going great until you discover that the 70 year old gasket that seals the oil pump is leaking badly. Not only is there no place open that would have a gasket, there is no place that would have this gasket period!
Don’t worry, you have a Glowforge.
Finding myself in this exact same predicament, I took a picture of the old gasket with a ruler next to it.
In Illustrator I scaled the image so that the ruler was measuring correctly, and then proceeded to draw the gasket. It was not much of a challenge since a little measuring showed that the original was all obvious fractions (i.e. the holes are 1-½”, ⅜” and 3/16”, etc.).
I just used a piece of chipboard to make the gasket. I smeared a bit of sealant on the paper but it is really a very low tech sort of thing that does not need to do more then keep the thick “way lube” oil from leaking out of the reservoir.
This is going to be great for anyone who works on old cars or engines in general.
I sure could have used it years ago when I had to hammer out gaskets for my old Volvos.
If you are curious, this is what a 2500lb cast iron yak looks like once it is shaved.
I want to see what you mill once she’s up and running. Nice job on project 10 btw. The ability to “create/make” what you need instead of driving to a store, finding and buying it ( let alone on a Sunday night) is just another amazing reason I can’t (but must) wait for my GF. Have a great , productive week !
Thats the cool thing about having a laser…
Designing and making stuff you plan out is great and all…but, its that impromptu, I need this now thing, that gives you that satisfied, I’m awesome because I have a laser, feeling…
For something precise you might always want to redraw.
Old gaskets get squished or torn, and you probably want to at least clean them up before cutting. In this case it might have worked just fine, but it really only took me about 5 minutes to draw.
Good job, I always keep a bit of “oil paper” on hand for impromptu gaskets. One obvious question, could you not have used the GFs camera to identify the shape from the gasket and then replaced it with some card stock?
Once again laziness wins. The scanner was down a flight of stairs and attached to a computer being used by my wife. The phone, on the other hand, was in my pocket.
I love this. And this question to anyone that would know, since I don’t know enough about using vector software, yet…could you not have used the lid camera to do a trace, then put the chipboard in to cut? Maybe not precise enough? I have much to learn. Thank you.
I just now realized that pomwah asked pretty much the same question.
I guess it would depend on how good the software is for tracing and how accurate you need the object to be. I’ve done the scan and trace as well as the take a picture with a reference object like @jkopel…maybe the Glowforge will do it all. That seems to be the implied functionality.
I know at least the software capability is out there…in Coreldraw x4, the trace feature was pretty good with a nice clean hi res image but in X6, its 10x more accurate. And now version X8 is out and is probably even more accurate on lower res images.
this is great… o crud I need x … bazinga I have laser
the trace and cut is cool and all but that’s more for free form I would think and not for something with a tight tolerance better to design fresh from a reference point so you know you have a proper fit rather then a out of tolerance rendering + 80yr deformed item
It does already! But I’m with Josh - if it’s precise, I’d rather pull it into a drawing program and redraw it with perfect circles, squares, etc.
Remember, questions about GF to me, not Josh. He definitely could have done that, but I probably would have done the same. Keep in mind that an overhead camera will never be quite as accurate as a flatbed. And the code’s pretty fuzzy right now. We’re about to improve the scan resolution 2.5x in a software update (stay tuned next week Josh) and expect to have our distortion calibration improve quite a bit over the next few months.
I wonder, did you use a vector drawing app on the phone to make that? Would it be possible? I don’t even know if such software exists! Shame on me… But instead of having to break out the computer for a simple drawing like this. Would be great (maybe not faster…) to draw the simple lines on your phone!
There are a few vector drawing apps for the phone, and if they can output SVG, you could use them - but right now we haven’t tested the app on the phone, so it’s probably not a time saving.
He definitely could have done that, but I probably would have done the same. Keep in mind that an overhead camera will never be quite as accurate as a flatbed. And the code’s pretty fuzzy right now. We’re about to improve the scan resolution 2.5x in a software update (stay tuned next week Josh) and expect to have our distortion calibration improve quite a bit over the next few months.