New videos: Two ways to use Stickvise

 

Stickvise is here!

Stickvise is officially available in the Hackaday store today, very excited!  Under $30 and shipping is free.

http://store.hackaday.com/products/stickvise

Stickvise went from random personal project to actual product with the help of the folks at Hackaday.  I can't thank them enough for helping me get off the ground.  For those who buy one please let me know what you think about it!

Joys of manufacturing

I have been going back and forth over the past month working out some kinks in manufacturing, I thought I would share the experience here.

After the first round of samples, I noticed the nylon parts were displaying quite a bit of warping along their length as can be seen in the picture below. This isn't a major functional problem, but aesthetically I didn't like it when I closed the jaws together and they weren't quite flush, they basically looked like () or )( no matter what I did.

The reason for this is that the parts were too thick (exactly .25") and cooled unevenly after being molded. The golden rule of molded part design is keep wall thickness consistent and don't go above about 1/8" thick for most plastics. So why did I design the jaws to be so thick? Well I originally designed these parts to be machined, and when I ordered them I did a poor job of conveying that intent to the manufacturer. I sent a drawing, a CAD file and specified a finish, but never actually specified that the parts should be machined. Of course the manufacturer assumed for a plastic part I must want it molded. Next thing I know, I have beautiful molded nylon parts along with a nice little warping issue.

The manufacturer agreed to modify part of the mold, adding a hollow core to the parts as shown below (before and after). 

Now the parts are cooling evenly and are molding perfectly straight. In the end this will probably be for the best as injection molding is an inexpensive and repeatable process that will allow me to quickly churn out thousands of vise jaws if I need to. You can see the new part below with the bottom side shelled out and the top side which stayed exactly the same minus the warping.

First article inspections

First samples from manufacturer came today, measuring everything to make sure it's perfect. So far there are a few issues that need to be smoothed out but overall the samples look awesome.

Machining Prototypes

Second round of metal prototypes - straight out of the mill.  I made these on a Tormach PCNC 770 milling machine.  Next steps are tapping and bead blasting

action shots of the CNC milling process:

Cheap way to add height for more clearance under PCB

Just had a good idea, instead of custom tall jaw plates, the standard jaw plates can easily be raised using M3 threaded standoffs. Easily found at the hardware store, could be stacked for as much height as needed.

Parametric Jaw Plates

Ok, I got this idea from the recent ramanPi spectrometer project that was competing for the 2014 Hackaday Price.  fl@C@ designed the 3D printable parts for his project in OpenSCAD which allowed him to set parameters that can be changed to automatically alter the geometry of the model. This lets you to easily change parts of the design to tailor them to your own needs. For Stickvise I will definitely do this for the jaw plates, allowing users to set the height and width of the jaw plates to suit a particular project, then just 3D print the customized files. I could also see having a parametric file for a set of v jaws that lets you tweak the depth and angle of the v.