A little machining and other bits

[absolom7691]

Same here. Everything I do ends up looking like an Etch a Sketch drawing.

Why do you think I went the CNC route??? lol. My manual work looks like it belongs on my mom's fridge with a gold star for trying!

[mixedgas]

My Day job stuff, having gone from if I need it: A. Full DIY manual shop access, B. Have a Machinist make it to my drawings, or C. send it over to an 8 station CNC shop, to having just a Sears Belt Sander, Hand Drill, Micro drill Press, and Tabletop Drill Press at the new job. The production tooling is sent out to a job shop down the street, thank God.

At my new employer, I do stuff that makes them think I'm Obi Wan Ryobi*, and world class. While I look at my stuff done here at work with more primitive tooling and think I'm Augie Ben Doggie at best. Often, I just take parts home and do them there.

* Well, compared to the last guy at my present employer, I do make good looking stuff. I have to redo / fix thirty years of quickly made gear with no drawings on a daily basis.

Steve

[VDX]

... I'm making "serious stuff" R&D since maybe 30+ years ... since then most "critical" stuff is made at home, as I have all sorts of "DIY" machines from CNC-milling, laser-engraving, paste-dispensing, micro-assembly, (stereo) microscopy ... and even some "nanotech"-stuff ... at home - But only because I was mainly busy with microtech, laser-development and some AI-programming around high-speed position detecting/tracing, image-recognition and microscopy recently -- so no "big, heavy and sturdy" tooling needed

Pretty all CEO's were OK with this arrangement, as otherwise it would cost some heavy bucks to install this in/for the different day-job in the respective companies

[TheHermit]

Just watched this, was reminded of this thread, figured VDX & Steve might find it interesting, and decided to share
😎

[VDX]

... yes, a pretty interesting application, if you have the equipment ... luckily I have a 30W MOPA from JPT

Maybe even more interesting -- my actual setup has a scanner+optic with 110x110mm scan area and a spot diameter of around 35µm ... actually ordered a different telecentric optic, which will give a reduced scan-field of 6x6mm(!) with a resulting spot diameter of only 6µ(!!) ... and roughly 30x higher energy density too (!!!) -- so comparable to a fiberlaser with 30W x 30 ==> 900 Watts (!!!!)

Viktor