I am one of the sound people at the church I attend. Something that has always been an annoyance, though not really realizing that it was really bothering me, was that the dB meter we have is made of a very slick plastic. It is not so much the plastic that I disliked, it was that slick plastic is slippery. I would usually make some horrible looking thing… a stack of CD covers, batteries, board tape… to try to prop the thing up. But usually it would eventually slip and fall off the ledge above the sound board. Last Sunday, whilst fighting the battle of the slippage, it occurred to me, well… I could just make something to hold the thing. That’s exactly what I did. Everything I have made to cut out on the Shapeoko has been  2D objects. They are 3D in the sense that they are not flat and you can pick them up, but they are essentially extruded 2D objects. While the stand was to be more 3D, is would be made with 2D shapes.  I knew that I wanted the meter to sit at an angle for better visibility. I had the main idea laid out in Draftsight within a couple of hours (still learning the CAD thing, so it took a little longer than expected).

While this may seem completely obvious, I totally spaced on the idea that things which intersect in a pocket, at an angle, will be longer than things which intersect at a 90 degree angle. I get it (now). I had everything cut out and I started to dry assemble it when I realized my oversight. In order to make this work, I would have to get the piece spot on aligned on the Spapeoko, then extend the slot on the back, or, recut the whole top plate. I decided to try to get it aligned. While it was not a perfect alignment, it was pretty dang close for human accuracy. I am really happy with this as a first piece that had nothing to do with the building of, or accessory to the machine.

After seeing how this came together, I decided to make another one (though a little wider) for my phone with a few alterations to allow for audio plug and power USB.

I finished this mod a couple of nights ago and have been testing it while working on my dust shoe. So far it seems to be making quite a lot of difference. I think that it intimidates the cutting material by having to look up at the menacing glare of the DeWalt. Also, being that the DeWalt is a moving, vibrating object, I have found that there are the added benefits of the upgrade making wonderfully unpredictable moves. I highly recommend this to any serious DW-660 user.

With proper cooling in place, I needed to respond to the needs of my wife… Get this $#!+ off of my kitchen table. Well, not her exact words, but I can read between the lines. Actually, she has been great about it all. I have been fretting about what and where my Shapeoko will live. I was initially thinking about putting having it in the garage. I live in south eastern US and I can see that 1. I will not want to work down in the garage during the heat of the summer. 2. Seeing that polar vortexes seem to like the south, and as you may have seen a little snow can bring the our City to a skreeeeching halt. I will not want to be in the garage for long periods of time. So… looks like it will be in my workshop.

If I am going to be in the workshop that means I need a table. I just finished cleaning off the air hockey table a couple of weeks ago, so that was off limits. Air hockey tables are a high gravity catch all for anything that does not seem to have some other place to live. Dangerous things really. I designed the table to be sort of a box on legs. I wanted a ceiling on it to support the drivers, control box, tools and so on.  It was designed to be long enough that I can grow the Shapeoko to 1 meter. Initially I will probably keep my laptop at the end of the table.

This was all originally supposed to sit on a couple of saw horses for the legs. After setting it up on the saw horses, the whole thing wobbled in an unsettling way. This is not exactly the sort of thing you want to be falling over mid milling job, so, I set off  to build legs that were a little more proper, not to mention structural.

Something that is being thought about (heavily) in the back of my mind is how loud the spindle (Dewalt DW660 router) and the vacuum are. They are each quite loud by themselves, but together they are a whole new monster. They are both running around 90 dB. Sound containment was also considered in the design. While I will not be able to eliminate the noise completely, I would like to knock it down to tolerable levels (without the need for hearing protection). So essentially the sides are built as a cage to house sound panels on the sides. I will also be building a sound panel box for the vacuum as well. Once built they should be able to slide into place. I played with some panels I currently have to test a couple of ideas. I will cover this in another post though.