Hawk's Babble-Log

I got my Sherline Series 2000 Milling Machine recently! Yay!

Dang, this sucker is heavy! And it’s _very_ solidly built. I’m impressed with how solid it is. I had a concern with this because the head and vertical column can be positioned in so many ways, but lemme tell ya: once you crank down on the bolts and get it tight… it’s _solid_.

Anyway, on with the pics! But first, a quick note about these pics: I did not have the lights turned up because it was pretty late by the time I started and even later by the time I finished. So the main light source for these pics was the built-in flash, which has a distance of, well, not much. So I apologize in advance for the crappy pics.

Packaging: it was very well packaged. The base & table (the base and lower portion of the whole thing) was bolted down to it’s own piece of plywood. Everything was wrapped in either bubblewrap, or light paper. It was very secure as it came with a loose board on top, which kind of made it’s own little box. This kind of box could take a lot of abuse.
Here you can see the swingarm and vertical Z-axis with it’s saddle. It was very well packaged and wrapped in paper. The belt guards are in the plastic bag. They will be at the base of the motor and secure the speed control.
Here I am in the middle of taking stuff out of the boxes and getting oriented with what’s what and what goes where… ‘n stuff. Near center is the speed control and motor (still in the box). I’ve got the swingarm mounted on the column base, and the spindle is mounted, too. You can see the assembly instructions lower right. The instructions are excellent, written in regular english (not Chinglish), are in color, and are complete with many diagrams, including a complete exploded view in the back with parts listings.
I put my hand on the swingarm to give you an idea of how small this mill is. By this time I had un-bolted the base from the plywood, but I left it in there because it’s a good solid board to use–better than the carpet! If I slide the swingarm out far enough it’ll tip the machine over.
Here it is from the front. The model is 2010, because I wanted the metric version. The regular version is in American inches, model 2000. Normally, I would have gone with the American version, but all the stuff I’ve been working with lately has been in metric, and I want to continue working with it, so I’m sticking with metric. Anyway, Sherline sells a conversion kit if I need to switch to American.
From this angle, you can see that I put the extra riser block on the column. I didn’t know it was optional when I put it together. I was just building a kit, and I had the pieces, so I put it together. Later on I found out that it was optional. Actually, the Z-axis (up and down) travel is so good (both low and high) that the spindle almost touches the table _with_ this extra height in the column. So I’m going to leave it on.
Another angle. With the swingarm slid all the way out, and swung around like this, and with the motor attached, it would tip over. This machine has _a lot_ of motion possibilities.
This is the motor mounted to the spindle with the speed control. In the first pic, the spindle is lying down on the paper, and the motor is facing away towards the power cord. It’s a very solid mounting, and the position of the motor is variable to apply tention to the belt, or to loosen it so that you can change the belt position (for more torque). In the second picture, the speed control is on top and the spindle is down and to the left. The third pic is for size comparison. Oh, and by the way, did I mention that these things are heavy? And solid? Well, they’re heavy, and they’re solid.
At last, the motor, speed control, and spindle are mounted to the Z-axis saddle! By the way, the speed control is continuously variable from 70 to 2800 RPM, and it does it’s best to keep the motor spinning at speed. Even under load, it is continuously adjusting power to keep it spinning at the same speed. It’s a good quality speed control unit and a good quality motor. As I was getting the tour down at the Shirline factory, the guy demonstrated the power of the motor. He turned it down to a very slow speed, then tried to stop it from turning by holding his thumb and fingers on top of the spindle wheel (the one with the belt). He pushed down as hard as he could and was unable to stop it or slow it down. When he let go, it maintained speed. I was also unable to stop it. I was impressed. In the third pic, the whole unit is facing away, so you get the rear-view. As you can see, the spindle is almost all the way up at the top of the Z-axis travel. The little brass thingie sticking out is a lock. Slide it counterclockwise and the Z-axis is locked from moving. I believe all axes have locks (but I’m no expert on this machine yet.
Here’s a little rotational tour of the thing all put together and ready to do some milling. In the last pic I slid the spindle down most of the way and attached the chuck. Also, it’s on top of the box so you can see the thing better. I can’t wait to start making stuff with it!

Okay, here’s the story how I got my Sherline 2010 Milling Machine:

My dad and I were chatting engineering talk over lunch. He was down here from Oregon because of three birthdays.

Okay, let me back up a bit. Me, my younger sister, and my youngest neice are all having our birthdays within about the same time. Actually, we’re all a few weeks off, but because my older sister is down in Vista, and because it takes at least an hour and a half just to get down there, we decided to celibrate them all at the same time. I was the lucky guy who got to drive my mom and my younger sister. The whole way. Both ways. Good thing I had my MP3 player with me.

So, what’s the point of my family’s pack of birthdays? My dad came down from Oregon for the partying! The next day he decided to drive on up to my area: Hollywierd. We had lunch at the Palms (Thai place just down the street from me). While I was muching down Chicken Fried Rice, we chatted about engineering. I can talk engineering with my dad, but not with my mom. Very different. Sometimes, I can even talk with Chicken Fried Rice in my mouth.

So… I asked him what tools I would need to build a flywheel. Between bites, he told me, “milling machine”. Actually, it sounded a bit different when spoken through a mouthful of Pad Thai, more like “mummumng makeung”, but I knew what he meant.

He also told me about lathes, but I figured I wouldn’t need one for my needs. When I got back home, I searched Google for “milling machines”. Bam, right there at the top of the list was Sherline. I didn’t know what Sherline was, so I clicked through:

http://www.sherline.com/

Holy moley! I had found the holy grail of home milling machines, on the first link! I didn’t even go back to the list of search results. I just stayed right there on the Sherline site for about a week. It’s HUGE. Not only that, but it’s big and it takes a really long time to read through it. I’m still haven’t even scratched the surface of this site. Plus, they’ve got all their manuals, parts list, catalogs, etc. online in HTML and PDF formats. I was in home/hobby milling machine heaven!

So… after much research and comparisons, I decided on the mill that I wanted: the 5410. It seemed to do just about everything I needed, and it was small enough to fit into an apartment. Here’s the picture:

Plus, it seemed to be a really good platform for upgrades. This means I could upgrade it to do all kinds of things, such as full CNC (Computer Numeric Control), greater height on the Z-axis, tilt on the Z-axis like the series 2000, electronic readouts on the controls, etc.

I figured I could start with the good ol’ 5400 and then upgrade as needed. Then I toured the factory.

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself again; let me back up… After doing much research on the net (we’re talking about _a lot_ of reading) I decided that this was the company I wanted to go with (they’ve been around for over 30 years; they must be doing something right), and this was the machine I wanted. Coincidentally, my Mom calls me up and says, “I’m going down to Vista to visit your sister on Wednesday, have some lunch, spend some time, etc. Wanna come with and drive ‘n stuff?”

By this time I knew Sherline was in Vista, just about five miles south of where my older sister lives. This fact strolled into my mind as I was listening to my mom. A very short moment after she asked her question, a plan formed in my mind. While deciding upon my answer, I think I took all of about 0.0137 seconds (approximaly) to decide.

“Yes.” was my prompt answer. I’m not even sure that my mom got her question all the way out before I answered.

“Really?” she asked. I think she expected me to decline.

“Yeah,” I said, “and while you’re having lunch, I can take dad and visit a store down there that I’m interested in.”

“Oh, sure. Great! You can drive!”

I made a mental note to put fresh batteries in my MP3 player and said, “You bet!”

And then it was just a matter of waiting until Wednesday. Three agonizingly long days! During this time I continued researching Sherline’s website. Hey, there’s a lot there to read!

Anyway, Wednesday finally considered about thinking about getting around to arriving, and off we went! As it turns out, my older sister was sick in bed that day, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Undeterred, we fed her some drugs and got her to a resturant for lunch. But after that she crashed in bed again. So while Mom read a book and tried to ignore the big dogs, Dad and I took off for Sherline.

According to the website, all were welcome at the Sherline factory and they would even give us a tour. I had already taken the online tour (several times), so I kinda knew what to expect. I just wasn’t sure how old the online tour was. We only got lost once, then parked and went in. The building looked exactly like the picture in the online tour. Once inside, the lobby looked exactly like the picture in the online tour. Up the stairs and there were the admin offices… yup, exactly like the picture in the online tour.

Are you sensing a pattern here? Lemme cut to the chase: It’s exactly like the online tour. The way it looks in the online tour is exactly the way it is. My Dad and I saw it all. A guy named Craig took us around and showed us everything, from receiving of raw material, to the finished product. We even got to play with a 5400 machine. I cut a groove in a small block of aluminum. It was so cool.

Now remember, this was my first time actually using a milling machine (of any kind), so regardless of how inane and useless a cut it was, it was still very, very cool. Also, quite surprisingly, it was quiet. It made about as much noise as a sewing machine.

My Dad asked which one I wanted. I told him, “The 5400.” He pointed out that the 8-direction mill (the 2000 series) had more clearance. Sure it did, but I told him that I could upgrade the 5400 to be kinda like the 2000 series. He pointed out that by the time I did this, I would have spent what it would cost to get the 2000 in the first place. And the 2000 was an 8-direction mill, which kicked ass over the 5400. Sure, I said, but it costs more. He offered to help me out on the purchase.

I took about 0.0138 seconds (approximately) to consider this, then said, “Okay.” A half-an-hour later it was done and in the trunk. Here’s a picture of the 8-direction 2010-series milling machine:

I was quite calm all the way back to my sister’s place. I was quite calm as I hung around and visited with everyone. I was quite calm helping my dad with his computer. I was quite calm the whole time.

I was quite calm as I drove back home. Mom even mentioned how calm I was, with my new toy in the trunk. I calmly replied, “I am containing my excitement.” And I was. Inside I was jumping off the walls. Outside, I was quite calmly calm.

When we reached my apartment building, I hauled the thing out of the trunk and just kinda grunted at how heavy it was. Shipping this thing would have been expensive. I took a deep breath, tensed up my body, and hauled the thing all the way into my building, down the hall, down the other hall, and into my apartment. I had to go through four doors and I never put it down.

Once in my apartment, I kept it in the box for a few days. See how calm I was? I calmly left it in the corner next to my dresser while I continued research and continued my regular work. I still had bills to pay, after all. The subject of it’s assembly will be the focus of my next blog post.

But in all this little adventure, I find it interesting how things seem to get done once I decide that they’re done. Isn’t that an interesting thing? I decided that I had a milling machine which would fit in my apartment. I decided this weeks ago, and then I made it happen. I would not have done anything with it without the prior decision.

Interesting. Now I’ve decided that I have a girlfriend. MMMmmmmm… my LadyHawk… where are you?

After I cleaned my water distiller for the first time, I noticed a bad smell and a bad taste in the water that it produced. I asked my roommate to smell it (a college grad in chemestry) and he said it smelled like iron.

Wierd. Well, I tried various things to get rid of the bad smell/taste: I cleaned it again. I scrubbed it hard with the dark-green (scratchy) side of my sponge. I cleaned it again with the stuff they gave me. I ran it without the carbon filter. I even ran a distilled gallon through again. But the bad smell/taste persisted.

“Oh GREAT!” I thought, “Somehow, I’ve already broken my distiller!”

I emailed customer service and got no response. So I called ‘em up and left a brief message about the problem. A guy called me back and figured out the problem almost immediately. The guy was good. He asked if I had used something scratchy to clean out the tank, and I told him how I had scrubbed it with my scratchy sponge.

There was the problem. There is some kind of coating on stainless steel which prevents the iron from seeping out into the water. This makes sense because stainless steel is made of iron and crome (please correct me if I’m wrong). This also makes sense because the bad smell/taste started right after I had cleaned it out the first time (using lots of fource with the _scratchy_ side of my green sponge).

So… how to fix: he said put one cup of vinegar in the tank, and fill it the rest of the way up with water, and run that through once without the carbon filter. Then, run a regular gallon through (tap water) still without the carbon filter to clean out the vinegar smell/taste. Then resume normal operation.

Well, actually, it took one or two more gallons going through to get the vinegar smell/taste out completely, but that _totally fixed the problem!_ Now I’m back to perfect, pure water with no bad smells and no bad tastes!

If you decided to get one of these little water distillers, don’t clean the tank with something scratchy. The support guy said it was okay to use something like a washcloth, but nothing more scratchy than that.

I hope this helps.

So, it’s been about a week now, and I’ve made a total of 5 gallons. I seem to be drinking a little less than a half-gallon per day, so I can easily keep up with both my needs, and my roommates needs (if he were to go near the stuff). The total loss of water (steam loss) in the receiving tank is about four ounces / gallon. That’s pretty darn good efficiency! I’m very pleased.

The water tastes great! I’m very pleased with the results. However, sometims I can pick up a slight plastic taste. I’m not sure if it is from the little plastic bottles I use, or the receiving jug. I’ll let ya know as I use it more and more.

Here’s what the tank looks like after distilling five gallons of L.A. water. Can you say YUCK?! It smells really bad, too. There is a strong amonia smell mixed in as well. I took more pics, but they’re all about the same. The interesting thing about a distiller is that I _could_ continue to use it like this and it would still make perfectly pure water! I love it.

Okay, time to clean it out. These are two animations of the cleaning process. The directions say to put in two tablespoons of the cleaning stuff in a full tank (actually, over fill it a little). Now leave the top off and plug it in until it starts to boil. Leave it like that for 15-20 mins and then dump out the water and wash it clean. By the way, the second animation is what it looks like inside when the unit is in normal operation–but you sure don’t wanna pull the top off and take a look! You’ll burn yourself from the steam.

Here’s what it looked like after I was done scrubbing it out with dish soap and a rough green sponge.

BTW, in the instructions, this procedure is recommended once a month. HA! I’ll probably have to do this once a week. After all, this is L. A. water we’re dealing with here. L. A. water is… how can I put this gently… BAD. As in NOT GOOD. But, on the other hand, it probably won’t kill ya. I’ve been showering in the stuff for years.

It took about 30-35 mins to get it boiling from hot water straight out of the tap. Then I let it go 20 more mins, so that’s about 50 mins total. That ran up 0.45 KiloWatt Hours of power. No problemo. Do the math on how much this cost–if you want; I’m not going to bother with it.

I got a cute little water distiller so that I could make my own distilled water. This little guy works great!

[http://a1-water-distiller.com/](http://a1-water-distiller.com/)

I got the “Stainless Top” version, because I don’t like the idea of the steam rolling over plastic.

The first thing I did was clean out the receiving jug. It arrives with a “new plastic” smell. I don’t like this smell too much, and I did not want it in my water. To clean it out, they recommend filling it with warm water and two teaspoons of baking soda (or dish soap). I didn’t have any baking soda, so I used dish soap. I let it soak overnite as recommended. The next morning (today), the “new plastic” smell was indeed gone, but now I had an “L.A. tap water chlorine” smell. Pretty yucky. So I decided that the first few gallons of distilled water that I made would be used for cleaning out the receiving bottle. Distilled water seems to be good at absorbing stuff. In this picture, the thing has been running for a few hours and has the receiving jug almost half full. I started with hot tap water, so this probably shaved off a half an hour from the total time.

I had it hooked up to my Kill-A-Watt so that I could monitor exactly how much energy the thing uses.

Here are the power consumption details:

The unit uses about 550 or 560 Watts of power @ 4.75 Amps. It’s power factor is nearly perfect at 0.99, so the VA (Volt-Amps) is pretty much the same as the Wattage. In about 5.5 hours, it used 3.15 KWh. What does this mean in dollars, you ask? Well…

Over the last two months, my roomie and I have used about 1170 KWh (KiloWatt-Hours), and this cost us about $121 (not including the huge L.A. city taxes). So, if you do some simple math, you’ll find that we pay about $0.104265 / KWh. That’s about ten and a half cents per Kilowatt-Hour. The water distiller consumed 3.15 KWh, so that cost me, can you guess? $0.32843475, or about 33 cents to make one gallon of distilled water. This kicks ass with whatever you could find in a supermarket! Or any other kind of market.

I put a themometer/hydrometer near it and took some readings. I put the remote thermometer up near the top, just above the fan, where it was a toasty 115 F. But this dropped significantly when I raised the thermometer a small distance. In the picture, it’s resting on the coil of the cord, and this lowered the reading down to 104.5 F. The temp sitting on top of the receiving jug ranged from 80.4 to 84.6 F. I did notice that the room got a bit warmer; I even had to open the window. This little sucker is going to be fun in our sweltering Hollywood summers! Aaah, sweat… I’ve almost forgotten what you felt like, suffering through this _bitterly cold_ Hollywood winter (like, it’s down to 70 F outside! _Burrrrrr!_).

Strangely, the humidity _dropped_ around the distiller. Over by the window, I have another thermometer/hydrometer set up, with the remote thermometer positioned outside the window so that I can saunter over to the window and check out the temp outside before actually leaving my protective domain. This one reported 35% humidity. But in the kitchen, near the water distiller, it dropped down below 30%. That’s kinda wierd, I would have thought it’d be the other way around.

By the way, if you were wondering what that little round white thing is between the distiller and the receiving jug, I’ll try and explain: It’s a little white thing which seats perfectly with the wide mouth of the receiving jug and the small output hole comming from the distiller. It contains a small “carbon sack” or “carbon pouch”, or carbon something. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I’m going to use it for now. I mean, we never had any carbon pouches up in Washington with our big-ass stainless distiller. That ugly sucker only took about an hour to make a gallon. Course, it wasn’t a full gallon; it lost about a fifth of the gallon due to lost steam. Aaah, good times. Anyway…

Here’s what it looked like after it had completed. The unit must have a timer or something because it shut itself off; I didn’t do it. The receiving jug is nearly full, so if there was any loss of steam, I can’t tell! The sides of the distiller were still warm, and the water in the receiving jug was still warm–and stayed warm for quite a while.

I’m very satisfied with this cute little sucker, and I’ll let ya know how it fares in the future.

I’ve been hunting around for a good calculator for a while. As part of this search (and before I picked up my TI V200), I downloaded a nice calculator called [The Haxial Calculator](http://haxial.com/products/calculator/), for Windoze (Windows). Thankfully, it also runs in Linux. They also have a version for the Mac.

The main design difference between this calculator and other calculator programs is that it’s designed to take advantage of the capabilities of a computer, rather than go through all the trouble to simulate a regular calculator device in a computer.

A very good example of a calculator device simulation for your computer is the [DreamCalc 3 Scientific and Graphicing Calculator](http://dreamcalc.com/). This sucker rocks, is easy to use, does graphs, has a ticket (history) window, and I would have bought it until I found the [Haxial Calculator](http://haxial.com/products/calculator/).

Here is a screenshot:

This is the standard calculator window. Many more screenshots are available on [Haxial's website](http://haxial.com/products/calculator/).

Look what I can do with my $200 graphing scientific calculator!


Yes! My life is now complete!

I can get my ass whipped at chess by my phone *and* my calculator!

TIChess… kicking my ass… on level 1.

I discovered how to take screenshots on my V200:

During a graphing operation, I paused it and used the TI software to take a screenshot

Here I finally found the memory report

At this point, I think I’ve got four or so additional applications, two games (TI Chess and a first-person 3D shooter called Arena3D), plus a few variables and text files (well, StudyCards–more on that later).

I couldn’t get it to take screenshots from within the TI Chess. I guess I’ll have to use my camera for that.

More to come as I continue to discover.

Texas Instruments Voyage 200

This little sucker is so much fun! And I haven’t *even* scratched the surface of what it can do.

On the evening I got it, I upgraded the OS, put in a Periodic Table, *and* a global 3D atlas! It was cake with the TI Device Browser software.

- [education.ti.com](http://education.ti.com)
- [ticalc.org](http://www.ticalc.org/)

This is the main menu, or the home menu.

A simple sine wave in split-screen 2D mode.

This is a formula to find the Force in Newtons using two values in Coulombs divided by the distance squared.

This is the Periodic Table I mentioned earlier, but in Super Compact Mode so that the entire table is displayed. There is a better mode where half of the table is displayed, with the element symbols. Each element is loaded with info.
I downloaded this from the [ticalc .org archives](http://www.ticalc.org/pub/v200/) and put it on the calculator using the USB cable plus TI’s software on [education .ti.com](http://education.ti.com/). It’s written by Eric Marion and Jakub Poznanski of Gamdwellerz. It seems these guys have written a lot. I’ve only begun my quest!

This is the world globe software I mentioned earlier. I found it in the [ticalc.org archives](http://www.ticalc.org/pub/v200/). Putting it in the calculator was easy: drag and drop. Done. You can pan around and zoom in to a pretty good level of detail (vector maps only) with quite a few titles.

More to come as I continue to discover.

My friend has set up a blog to help us coordinate our efforts at building electronics:

http://blog.studioufo.com/atmoic/

I’ll mostly be posting info about electronics there.