Wooden Bicycle Pump

wooden pumpWell not quite, but a wooden handle anyway. We don’t just do bits and bytes at TOG! The bicycle pump handle broke and it seemed a shame to dump an otherwise perfectly good pump. So with a bit of nice round wood cut from an old roller blind pole, we made a new handle. Drilled a hole in the handle and a couple of small holes in the metal shaft of the piston to give the glue a bit of grip.

We wanted to use some glue with a little bit of flexibility or “give” in it, instead of something that set rock hard. That seemed to be the way the old handle was fitted. So our old reliable hot glue gun was fired up. It sets hard, but not rock hard. Pump is back in action, good as new, and it even looks a bit rustic with its new wooden handle. We have lots of members interested in bicycle things at TOG. Drop in and see what we get up to. Pics here.

More lathe work

Our lathe is finally getting some good use! This time, a small partHose adapter - work in progress was made from aluminium, a coupling for connecting two pieces of tubing for the water cooling system in the upcoming CNC router project. It will replace the existing temporary hose-and-clamps hack.

A piece of bar stock was clamped in a 4 jaw chuck, made into a
cylinder and turned down to about 16mm diameter. Next we turned half of it down to about 6mm and drilled a 4.5mm hole through it, using a drill chuck. Lastly we smoothed the edges slightly and parted the whole thing off.

The end result is more fIt fits!unctional and looks a lot better!

The whole operation went smoothly in overall retrospection. However, we had few small issues to deal with on the way. Firstly, it wasn’t obvious how to set gearing for the power feed, as the manual wasn’t very clear. Another problem was that the  square shape of stock, required the use of a 4 jaw chuck, which is not self-centring.  That adds a couple of extra steps to set up, as centring of the stock has to be done manually in such a case.

Ebike Charger Lead

cable

Nothing much to see here! A quick weekend afternoon hack. The ebike power supply died, so time to knock up a cable to charge the battery from a variable power supply.

A 3-pin XLR socket, a fuse holder with a 5A fuse and a diode for reverse current protection. A bit of soldering and heatshrink and we’re up and running. Checked it out. Set the power supply to 60v (same as the old charger) with 3A current limit, and we’re charging ok.

Lasersaur fixed

First of all great to have community like Lasersaur after lots of cutting over last 3 weeks we started to have some issues with our Lasersaur we thought we had broken the focus lense however it just needed a good clean.

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Even after this we where still not getting very far after suggestions from Fab Lab Limerick to make following extra long laser head and put cardboard at the end to focus.

Works a treat and made it much easier to focus, thanks FabLab and the community for getting our laser up and running again.