类型: IC
作者: mkawa
发布时间: 2013-09-26 12:02:48
更新时间:
2013-10-24 20:11:02
原链接:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=49024.0
Hi Folks,
Recently, I’ve been incredibly humbled by the
outpouring of donations into the geekhackers trust fund.
Although I am basically liable for Geekhackers the company
(hereby, geeckers), as the community pledges into it, they
are owning more and more of it in spirit.
I’ve been
trying to figure out what I can do to best serve the
community. Inventory is a difficult problem, although I will
be expanding my inventory and getting the webstore up, I
have to be cautious with that, because, for example, I have
a couple thousand in lubricant and ps2 adapter inventory
already that is moving pretty slowly. I like having it here
so that people can get these things on demand for very
reasonable prices (I always try to beat every known price on
my inventory).
However, I feel that tooling is a much
better way to serve the community. Currently, the major
piece of tooling the geeckers owns (that is still very much
in the red and basically represents a huge amount of my
equity in the company) is the makerbot rep2x. It’s a bit
problematic, in that the duty cycle I have been running at
it has broken almost every piece in the machine at least
once, but the result of this is that makerbot, inc is quite
aware that we exist and that i serve the community with one
of their (quite cool, actually) units. they have helped
quite a bit in providing comped parts where they can and
keeping my breakage costs down. my current project with the
makerbot is to make easy dispensing and rolling spools for
the kester 44 i have in my stockroom but not apportioned
into sellable units yet.
hence, ideally what i’d like
to do is help the community by purchasing one more piece of
tooling that is appropriate for the community and can be
heavily used (without breaking, has high demand, etc.).
Option
a) Purchase a sherline 5400 series CNC-ready mill and design
a control system for it. The cost of this will be in the
range of 1500$. These mills are extremely high precision,
with some care (basically they need to be weighed down).
however, they only handle small parts. think 40-65% keyboard
cases, and I have no experience with CAM and gcode
compilation yet in the subtractive realm. even if i were to
purchase the unit tomorrow, it would be months before this
service were online.
Option b) Custom powdercoating
services. I have been looking into what i can do
powdercoating-wise in my apartment. unfortunately we
recently lost our custom powdercoater, so i could attack
that hole in our tooling availability. i have found benchtop
self-contained units that will allow me to bead blast in my
apartment; i already have the solvents needed and a solvent
setup to do that part of prep. the hopper-based cabinet
would allow me powdercoat up to 80% keyboard cases with the
colors that we purchased for our last powdercoater.
basically i would bead blast in the cabinet, then snake a
ground wire in, clean out the cabinet, and then snake the
powdercoat gun in and powder, then bake using an industrial
quarter-size convection oven. total cost of this, as I have
determined so far (although with my inexperience this may be
off) is about 300-400 for a compressor i can run in my
apartment, 700 for the cabinet, 700 for the powder gun
system, and 600 for the oven, for an estimated equipment
cost of about 2000$. I would need to pull a donation drive
to fund much of this, as geeckers cash flow is not high
enough yet to pay for this. however, the first job i run
will be the gh edition panavises. i have 20 of these at the
moment, but i am going to attempt to double or triply my
stock of them in the very near future (ie, today).