Stuff What I Made

Towards the tail end of 2017, the famed for its middle aisle supermarket chain ALDI had a deal on a 3D printer, for £300. It was badged as Balco but was in fact just a re-branded version of the Chinese brand Wanhao. [Read More]

Around about the summer of 2017, the engine of the Corrado started making a bit of an alarming noise. At first I thought it was just tappets; it seemed to go away after it warmed up only to come back with a vengeance later. Peering in the filler, the oil looked OK. Then it got worse. Much worse. Long story short, one of the rod bearings on the big end had spun. There was now ample evidence of this given the even distribution of flakes of bearing material throughout the oil. [Read More]

As a teenager in the late 90s, a lot of the music that I owned was on vinyl thanks to it being much more affordable than getting it on CD. Who could have predicted how that vinyl would become fashionable again? Anyway I digress, I’d had this vinyl sitting in a pile for 15 years. I should do something with it, I thought. [Read More]

My milling machine originally came with a normal AC motor. This had drawbacks. [Read More]

The controller box my milling machine originally came with was a bit lack-lustre really. The box itself appeared to be repurposed from a previous life, and from the outside it had minimal indication of what was going on. At some point I added (I can’t remember when) hall effect limit switches and simple opto-isolator based circuit to insulate them from the Gecko stepper driver control board. Later, for reasons I’ll cover in another post, I decided to replace the motor, and that meant building a new control box. [Read More]