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Etching Ever So Carefully

I’ve had mitigated results with my specular holographs, I ran several trials, and only one was really worthy so far. I’ve learned a few lessons, but I’ve had enough success that I want to spend time and resources refining. The way the tip action worked so far was very blunt, I rigged a servo on a 3D printer which could instead have 2 steppers driving the pen up & down action. But that was an easier first step for my plotter stack. So the obvious thing to refine first is to replace the servo with the existing steppers, which is more of a programming challenge. And that part wasn’t too bad. What was much harder though, is how to move the tip so that it presses against the medium with defined and reproducible pressure. With the variations I can’t just “count steps”, and some media (acrylic) require very little pressure, unlike aluminum which was more forgiving. So I know I want to experiment with tip pressure, which means getting a load cell. And that on the other hand was a whole can of coding worms. I won’t go into the boring details, what matters is that it’s etching!

I have the tip go very carefully down until it reaches a pressure of 20g, and then it tries to maintain it while moving. Between the incessant taring, and the slow motions, it’s made everything a thousand times slower. I don’t care though, I can do other things while it works.

The machine makes really cool noises with all the extra stuff to find the right pressure. Simply keeping an ear out while doing other things has been a great tool to debug and improve algorithms.

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Extra Christmas

The town’s been wanting to remove an oak that is rotting and is just enough on the road that they hit it with the plow sometimes. It’s a family favorite as it’s on a dirt road we often walk on, and it’s absolutely massive. It has 3 enormous trunks, and each trunk has several branches the size of the trees I usually take. It’s next to a power line, rotted and far bigger than anything I can reasonably tackle. Let’s just say I’ve been excited when I heard about their plan to drop it. In Vermont when a town or utility needs to clear trees, the landowners get to call dibs. That was a year ago and I thought maybe they had forgotten about it. And so one day, I hear some chainsawing in the distance, and when this happens, I usually follow the noise to make sure no one is poaching my trees, and because I like to chat with neighbors. To my surprise a whole crew is there, 7 guys with heavy equipment going at the big oak. In a very typical Vermont interaction I get to meet the road foreman, and I tell him I’m definitely keeping the tree. He was aware, the information wasn’t lost in the year it took for the gears to get in motion.

I tell him he’s welcome to leave it over the bank for me to come grab, to which he responds he’ll drop it in my driveway if I prefer… Yes sir, I very much prefer not moving several tons of tree by myself :). And that’s how 31 nice big chunks of oak showed up in my driveway. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and I got to enjoy a good show (watching pros and heavy machinery at work). It’s Christmas all over again.

Some chunks are massive, and there is still a very full day’s worth of work left behind in the woods. All in all there’s probably 2 years worth of firewood. But maybe some of it is worth milling, we’ll see.