Category Archives: milwaukee

Iron Casting: Spring Iron Pour

Posted on by Arnold, David

The Casting Area is running another Iron Pour.

This Event will be open to participants, Members and Non-Members.

Please contact Dave directly if you are a Visiting Artist/Non-member and need studio time to make your own artist mold. All non-members must sign the “Iron Casting Waiver” to participate.

Studio Time is to be scheduled in advance. If you plan on bringing a mold or making a mold all weights must be estimated and metal must be broken by said attendee. If you are unable to break iron due to medical reasons please reach out to Dave.  

Resin-bonded sand molds are weighed before they get to the pour floor. 

Artist Tile and Doodle Bowl Workshops:

Saturday 03-23-24 @ 12:30-3:30
Sunday 04-07-24 @ 12:30-3:30
Saturday 04-20-24 @ 12:30-3:30

Saturday April 27th 
We are planning to have the Safety Meeting at noon. If you plan on participating on the pour floor, show up to the safety meeting and sign the waiver, it’s required. Observation will be available from the north side of the pour floor. Observation will only be accessible from Norwich Ave. The proposed Schedule is the following:

8:00am Pour floor setup (leveling and placing molds)
9:00am Scratch blocks & Doodle Bowls available for sale.

10:30am burn-in (preheat furnace with immersion burner forced air and natural gas) 

12:00 safety meeting Immediately after the safety meeting, we go on blast.

*Going on Blast – removing immersion burner and attaching Blower to the furnace and entirely running of forced air and Coke Start charging iron/coke as it settles

1:00pm Should have first tap, Tapping every 13 minutes. 

4:00pm Drop bottom when all molds are filled – brief clean up.

 

Sunday, April 28th 

10:00am Clean-up and devesting molds:

Clean-up is required if you have an artist mold on the pour floor. All Artist Tiles/Doodle Bowls will be out on display for pickup. No additional payment is required for these items. For Artist Molds, gating and pour cups may be cut off and thrown in the iron pile.

Please weigh your castings and provide payment in the donation bin or via Wild Aprocot bit.ly/3wKtOcS Please Refer to the rates section for pricing https://wiki.milwaukeemakerspace.org/areas/casting/rates

Contact Dave for more information at dave@davidmarnold.com or via cell phone 4142150499

Casting Area Update

Posted on by Arnold, David

Many of you my not know, but the casting area has been diligently meeting every Wednesday at 5pm for almost 2 years now. Some weeks we haven’t been able to get together but for the most part it has been a consistent schedule. Aluminum casting has always been a thing we have done, even back at Lenox. Since moving over the equipment we have expanded our ability to cast other Non-Ferrous metals such as Copper, Brass and Bronze. We have also expanded our capabilities to do Ceramic Shell, and Sodium Silicate Resin Bonded molds. Iron Casting has always been a goal to do when looking for the new building. We can finally say that we are ready to start up our Cupola Furnace who goes by R2V2.

The only requirement is we need to have molds made and iron broken. Until we have molds that equate to an estimated total of 500 lbs of metal,  we will not be able light up the furnace.

Meet us on Wednesdays at 5pm to get signed off on mold making processes and getting signed off to use the crucible furnace. Bring a pattern to get cast or if you just want to check out the area come on by. No appointments are needed. We need your help to make molds. Premade artist tile molds are available for sale with the cost of metal included.

In addition, if you happen to see a cast iron tub, sink, or radiators on the side of the road please contact Dave to collect it. The more cast iron donations we can get the better.

Casting Area Wiki

Redbull Flugtag Milwaukee

Posted on by Carl Stevens

For the past 2 months a team of makers has been frantically designing and building a glider for Redbull Flugtag.  It was one of the most fun projects I have ever had the privilege of working on.  Thought we did not place in the competition I wanted to share what we have learned and share some CAD files for future Flugtag builders to find and reference if they wish.

Team Flies at All:

When I put up the call to see if other members where interested in participating I was shocked when almost 20 people came to the first meeting.  At that meeting two opposing directions were posed for our entry.  One was a craft that would be as crazy as possible that would just be fun to look at and not attempt flight in a meaning full way.  The second was “team flies at all” who thought the fun part of the project would be the challenges of making a craft that would generate lift.  As the next weeks went on that second team was the only group that kept meeting and planning.  

Material choice and testing:

At one of the first design meetings Jon Drayna brought in a sample that he had worked on that week that would become the structure of our design.  It was 1 inch pink insulation board laminated on either side with 2mm strips of wood.  This made the normally flexible material very ridged while still being extremally light weight.

With this structure in mind I went to work in Fusion 360 and modeled up a craft.  Using a paper added to a google drive the team was sharing I was able to design a parametric air foil that would in theory provide high lift at low speed.  I even devoted the weekly Fusion 360 class to making an airfoil.  Below is a link to that class and the parametric airfoil Fusion 360 file will be in the link at the bottom.

We chose to cover our wings with window cling film.  I think this is one of the best choices we made.  Even though the film required lots of care it was cheap and light weight compared to alternatives.  On the day of the event we saw boat vinyl and lots of other materials but I stand by our window film.  Another decision that I was happy with on our craft were the ridged supports in the front and back of our wing.  Lots of teams chose not to do this and their air foil shapes were lost due to the shrinking material. 

Our biggest lesson:

If you have ever attempted to do something for the first time before you know that it usually doesn’t work.  We all had lots of optimism about our chances to “fly” but it takes practice to learn new things.  You can’t make an omelet with out breaking a few eggs.  On Flugtag our point of failure was the cart.  We knew that if the back of the cart were to push up on the back of the glider it would push the nose down right into the water.  We had taken care to design a two part cart that would we thought drop away from the craft with the use of a one way hinge mechanism.  The idea was as the front of the cart holding the glider went off the edge it would fall down bending at the hinge and not creating leverage lifting the back of the glider.  Maybe it was swelling due to humidity or jus the paint being sticky but this was our point of failure.   You can see in the video the cart breaking part of the tail as it forced it up and as soon as it fell away the wings started to work.  It was too late at that point though.

I use used a bad word in that last paragraph, failure.  At least most people think of it as a bad word.  Lets reframe that right now.  Failure is what happens on the path to success.  Failure is what happens when you are pushing your self far beyond your current capabilities and knowledge.  No one has ever learned something from success it is failure that teaches us and failure that motivates us.  

We failed to fly but we succeeded at working together to build one of the coolest projects to ever come out of this building.  It was so much fun working with everyone that pitched in for an hour or two or for weeks on end.  The bravest member of the Makerspace, Faith, got to stand on a stage in front of 50,000 people and answer questions about what a the Milwaukee Makerspace is.  I have zero regret except for maybe not jumping of the edge of the ramp…

Open Source Everything:

We learned so much.  You can take a look at our CAD files and build images and learn with us.  All are at the link below for you to copy and improve.

Open Source Project Link.

Giant Laser Cut Map of Milwaukee

Posted on by KevinB

I’ve been on a laser cutting kick lately.  In the last two weeks, I made 9 travel coasters, two of which feature neighborhood maps of places I’ve lived.  Though I could have just raster cut these very small coasters, generating the vector version allowed me to create this big map of Milwaukee, Wisconsin!  This wall hanging map is the maximum size of our largest laser cutter: 24″ by 18″!  Boom!

Big_MKE

This map was inspired by a project made by my friend NJStacie a while back.  While she has both the infinite patience and the limitless awesome that allowed her to use an X-acto knife to cut out all the city blocks of Boston from an actual map, I used a laser cutter and software. To create images for my roadtrip coasters, I simply took screen captures of google maps, and processed them into vector files using GIMP and Inkscape.  There are so many extraneous details in google maps (lines for buildings, the text labeling street names, etc), that it was clear I needed an alternate approach for making this map.

Its easy to get a small google map without text labels, check out the url of this page.  My first approach to get more than 512×512 pixels was to use the Google Maps API, which is a toolset to imbed an interactive google map into webpages using Java.  The great thing about it is that the rendering style is completely configurable. Even better, there is a GUI to quickly configure your desired style, and automatically generate the JSON object to pass to the style property of the MapOptions on your webpage.  Instead of investing 10 or 15 minutes reading about how to integrate all these steps, I just created the style, and took a few .png screen captures.  I opened them as layers in GIMP and combined them to create the following grey and black image:

milwaukee_whole

I saved it as a .png, and imported it into Inkscape, selecting Embed Upon Import. I created vector data from this raster image by first selecting Path -> Trace Bitmap, opening a dialog box with many choices.  I really only experimented with the top two import choices, Edge Detect and Brightness Cutoff.  I found that Edge Detect gives two outlines, one of the streets and one of the city blocks.  For this reason, Edge Detect seems to be the best choice to create the widest streets, and therefore the strongest paper cutout.  It required some cleanup though, so I selected Path -> Break Apart, adjusted the Fill and Stroke, and then just deleted all the street outlines (thereby widening the spaces between buildings, which is effectively the streets).  As some of the streets were to narrow to really form one continuous outline, they formed a lot of smaller street segments that I deleted in five or ten minutes of fast and furious clicking.  After all those steps, a vector version of the following image was produced:

vector_lines_of_milwaukee

I did a few test cuts to find a power/speed that cut all the way though some colorful, 98lb, 25″ by 19″ acid-free archival paper I picked up.  The goal is to use enough power to cut though, without using too much power, which widens the kerf (laser cut width), thereby undesirably narrowing the streets.  This ended up being 100% power, with 52% speed. Check out the laser cutter in this real-time (not sped up) video.  Note that one typical problem of having both air assist and super-power fume-removal suction while cutting is that the laser cut bits tend to flip over into the cutting path, potentially resulting in an incomplete cut.  That meant when the laser cutting was complete, I had to carefully punch out the 15 or 20 stubborn city blocks that weren’t completely cut though.

GIANT Laser Cut Milwaukee Map!

I also cut this design into a coaster, and made one with my old Massachusetts neighborhood too.  Naturally this was a lot of data on a small surface, but the results are pretty good despite the vector cutting time approaching that of the raster cutting time! I cut these at 100% power, 100% speed, like the other coasters.

Map_Coasters_Improved

After I completed all these steps, I learned about a way to access vector map data directly.  The Open Street Map site allows export of .svg vector data just by clicking the share button on the right side of the page!  Even better, one can zoom in to Milwaukee, and press the big green Export button on the upper left to export an .osm database of the visible section of the map.  This OpenStreetMap archive can be opened in Maperative! and a style can be applied to the rendered map.  Maperative has several styles built-in, and I simply edited the google maps-like style to omit all the buildings, and draw all roads, highways, on-ramps, etc in a black with no border.  Maperative can export .svg files, but I found the content of these files are a bit of a wreck.  For example, each different road type is a separate vector path, meaning that there are many separate paths in the file.  Ultimately I found I’d taken the wrong approach, as I should have rendered all the city blocks as black vector outlines, and omitted the roads – as that is what I really need to laser cut.  With a bit more work, using Maperative would likely be a quite quick path from map to laser cutter. However, I abandoned this approach as I’d already created a somewhat reasonable workflow.