Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Well put. It's the sentiment that drives most of the projects around here, I'd say!
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Hi Ryan,

Bob here (we met on TPZ). I see you are doing a run of TMP scanners? Is there a signup list?

Hi again Bob! You can subscribe to this thread and I'll post there when the very small run I'm working on is complete (in about a week or so). I am not going to be selling them, but I am always open to trades or willing to accept raw materials to help me with my next build.
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Ok, now I see why you wanted to do so much wet sanding with a power tool- didn't realize the goal on the scanner bodies was a no-paint finish. It looks great!

Yeah, I don't know where I got that crazy idea (the guys at Reynolds Advanced Materials may have suggested it), but I'm quite glad I did. The polished onyx resin feels really cool. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly. It's kind of like a one of those tumbled/water-polished stones you see in science museum gift shops.
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

That's gonna feel like a real protoplaser as opposed to a prop -- not that there's anything wrong with that at all. Very nice in fact. :)
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

[...]

The Metabo random orbit sander has been doing a further excellent job in helping me process through my TMP scanner bodies my quickly. Moving up in successive grits from 400 to 3000, I've been able to get the awesome Onyx resin up to a really spiffy luster.

View attachment 428664 View attachment 428663

It takes a lot of work (wet sanding, drying with a paper towel to reveal flaws, and sanding again, over and over again), but it feels really nice. I definitely prefer it to paint, though I'm not sure in the end it will end up having been less work (as I had originally hoped it would be).

[...]

Oh wow, dude! I love the finish you've managed to get on the Onyx resin scanner bodies :)

I agree with asalaw those will have more of a feel like a real protoplaser than a simple prop.

I'm going to have to come up with something for trade (prop or materials) to secure one of these beauties!
 
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Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Oh wow, dude! I love the finish you've managed to get on the Onyx resin scanner bodies :)

I agree with @asalaw those will have more of a feel like a real protoplaser than a simple prop.

I'm going to have to come up with something for trade (prop or materials) to secure one of these beauties!

There was definitely always one with your name on it, Elvis! ;)

I'm currently investigating ways of bringing the polish up on it even more. I am looking at getting some of those 3M radial polishing brushes used by jewelers and putting them on a Foredom lathe to polish the shine way up. Apparently there is also a special compound for polishing resin with a cotton buff that I might try. The idea of this project for me was to try something super simple and try to use it as a way to master some basic techniques (casting, machining, finish work) without getting bogged down in extraneous complexities (that's what my holo-imager project is for!), so I've welcomed all these digressions along the way.

That's gonna feel like a real protoplaser as opposed to a prop -- not that there's anything wrong with that at all. Very nice in fact. :)

Thanks! That's always what I'm going for. It has to look like it's straight from Starfleet R&D or I'm not happy. ;)
 
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Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Yesterday was given over mostly to prop research and discussion on the TrekPropZone, but I do have a a few quick updates from last night.

E Williams's suggestion of the toothbrush to remove acrylic misadventures was an excellent one. I found that combining this with some Bon Ami powder made it even more effective. (Just make sure to find a firm bristle toothbrush, which isn't easy these days.)

20150122_055200924_iOS.jpg

After the photo above I did some puttying, sanding, and re-priming. Might take a crack at a new paint job tonight.

I also mixed some paint for the bodies of my "almond styli" (for want of a better term), as per nick daring's recent discovery. This is a combination of mostly titanium white with a bit of yellow oxide and a tiny bit of raw sienna until it sort of looked right to me. I think the end result color is a bit closer to the light colored desktop monitors than to the stylus, but it has a certain Galaxy Class look about it that pleases me. I'll do the dark brown bits tonight probably.

20150122_071213062_iOS.jpg
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Wow! Seriously great work going on here :D
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

"Eject core" that's a key you don't want to hit by mistake :p
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

"Eject core" that's a key you don't want to hit by mistake :p

It's OK. They're keyed to DNA patterns and Galvanic skin response, so it only works if you are authorized and really want to do it. ;)
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

There was definitely always one with your name on it, Elvis! ;)

I'm currently investigating ways of bringing the polish up on it even more. I am looking at getting some of those 3M radial polishing brushes used by jewelers and putting them on a Foredom lathe to polish the shine way up. Apparently there is also a special compound for polishing resin with a cotton buff that I might try. The idea of this project for me was to try something super simple and try to use it as a way to master some basic techniques (casting, machining, finish work) without getting bogged down in extraneous complexities (that's what my holo-imager project is for!), so I've welcomed all these digressions along the way.

[...]

That's good to hear! :D And you're planning on polishing them even more? Wow... that's pretty amibitious, as they already look amazing!
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

That's good to hear! :D And you're planning on polishing them even more? Wow... that's pretty amibitious, as they already look amazing!

Irrational and excessive ambition is my specialty, especially when it comes to entirely superfluous tasks with little incremental value. That and spending way too much money on tools. So, in short, YES. ;)
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Irrational and excessive ambition is my specialty, especially when it comes to entirely superfluous tasks with little incremental value. That and spending way too much money on tools. So, in short, YES. ;)
Incremental what? WTF you talkin' 'bout, Willis? :p
 
Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Monday was largely an exercise in laser cutting; Tuesday was an exercise in snow.

The Lasersaur cutter at the Artisan's Asylum has been down for some time, so on Monday I enlisted the generous help of Brian Johnson (the digital fabrication lab steward at the AA) in making a custom set of printer settings for the Epilog Helix, in hopes that I could finally cut styrene. I prefer styrene to acrylic for scratch building because styrene is very easy to sand and weld. Unfortunately, acrylic is excellently laserable, styrene not so much. However, though took a couple of hours of fiddling around with tiny little two-second cuts of 1mm test squares, I'm happy to report that I was largely successful in finding some workable settings for styrene (detailed settings and information below), at least on the Epilog.

But first a bit of back story. I have been working with Eric Ardros on a build of the the Subspace Beacon from TNG "Schisms."

Screencap2.png

This prop also appears in TNG "Cause and Effect" as a dekyon field modulator.

Thanks to Elvis's hand-drawn plans and my translating them into digital designs in Illustrator/CADtools, we had plans to make the planar components in styrene. (If anybody wants the plans to do this yourself, just PM me and I'll be happy to share.)

Plans v2 - Thick styrene.png

The many small curves and fine details of this design meant that cutting the design out by hand would be both tedious and tricky. It was thus the perfect project to try automated laser cutting.

However, having used the Epilog in the past, I knew that none of its existing materials settings would work. The best I could get it to do was to cut out some melted and charred out black figures that vaguely resembled my original design. And in the wrong size no less (more on this and Inkscape later).

However, Brian showed me how to create new materials settings for the Epilog and I began experimenting. The three relevant variables are:


  • Vector Speed
  • Vector Power
  • Vector Frequency

My ultimate approach was systematically to titrate each variable independently and then to make a small test square cut after each change.

20150126_225823298_iOS.jpg

Even from the first few test cuts, some things became clear, the main one being that low frequency is probably the most important strategy when it comes to lasering styrene. The concept here is very simple: the frequency controls the number of laser pulses per linear unit of travel of the focal point. A very low frequency would result in a perforated line, whereas a high-frequency line would be continuous. The advantage of low frequency on styrene is that it helps to avoid the material overheating. Lowering the power below anything close to what you would use on acrylic are also important steps toward the same end, but I found that the frequency decreased helped more than anything else and opened up room for me to start experimenting with power and speed (which had more to do with how many passes it took to cut rather than affecting the melting and flaming issues). Another important strategy is multiple passes. You just have to get used to the idea that you're going to have to sit through many repetitive passes when working with styrene. The finer the details of what you're cutting, the lower the power you'll need to use and the more passes, sometimes up to 15 (!) in the case of very narrow walls <1-2mm. I found that too high a speed required far too many passes, so I ended up setting the speed surprisingly low as well as the power.

Here were the settings that worked best for me on 1.5mm styrene. (Interesting, the same held true for 2mm styrene; I just needed to make a few more passes.) Each number is on a scale out of 100.

Normal cutting
  • power 15
  • speed 15
  • frequency 50
  • 2 passes for score-and-snap, 4 passes for full cut-through

Fine detail cutting
  • power 9
  • speed 25
  • frequency 60
  • 15 passes, which should get you almost clear through the material

I found the 15 passes fine-detail cut particularly necessary for the part of the design shown in this video. Those tiny little rounded rectangles have very narrow little filaments of dividers between them, which tended to snap as I was trying to snap out anything but a completely cut-through part. But on the normal power setting (which was already very low for styrene in the first place), these thin walls melted and deformed, while at the same fewer passes meant that the styrene wasn't cut through. With such fine details, trying to snap along scored lines just breaks everything at once, so you really need to cut almost all the way through (you can finish the job with a hobby knife if necessary if the 15 passes don't do the trick (or even do a few more passes, if you have more patience than I do!)

20150127_014336550_iOS.jpg20150127_014352793_iOS.jpg20150127_014636024_iOS.jpg

And here is the resulting build test-fit using electrical tape. (The buttons are 3M bumpons, SJ5008, if I remember correctly.)
20150127_061757340_iOS.jpg

Now, the problem is that all of the cuts are A LITTLE OFF. The culprit is Inkscape, which is the vector software that the Artisan's Asylum uses for printing to the laser cutter. Let me just say that, like most FOSS, Inkscape is an execrable piece of amateur-hour garbage, and anybody who says it's a plausible alternative to Illustrator for even the most trivial tasks has been dropping acid with Richard Stallman behind a bundle of CAT5 cables in a network wiring closet at MIT. No. No. No.

The issue is that Inkscape just silently throws away the dimensioning units from the files it imports (even when it's formats that accomodate them, such as PDF or AI) and converts everything to screen pixels using 90dpi as its assumption. Illustrator uses 72dpi (an admittedly archaic Adobe quasi-standard). However, in Illustrator's case this doesn't really matter because it actually understands real-world dimensions (dpi only comes into play with Pixel Preview or exporting to raster images), but Inkscape defaults to pixels for its native units (for vector editing software?!). And so all of my drawings get scaled down at a 90:72 ratio, as best as I can tell. And I haven't been able to figure out how to scale them back up at the proper ratio thanks to Inkscape's counter-intuitive interface and horrible documentation. Yes, yes; I know Inkscape can theoretically import DXF, which allows you to set the units. However, that feature is totally broken and ignores half of my vectors. Ugh.

Sorry, I used to work in the open source world and I'm obviously still a little bitter about how ham-fisted most of its tools are.

I'm still searching for a workaround for the Inkscape scaling issue. An inspection of the relevant listservs isn't helping. I have a few ideas for workarounds:

  • See about hooking my own Microsoft Surface up to the laser printer directly and printing to it from Illustrator (if the AA folks will let me and the drivers are available publicly)
  • Try printing from a PDF viewer in Linux, which hopefully would respect the PDF format's native understanding of real-world units
  • Try getting Inkscape to scale the artwork to compensate for its distortion factor
  • Try figuring out if there is any export/import format that Inkscape will actually understand properly

Slowly but surely I'm figuring out this styrene pwpw thing though!
 
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Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Like I said before, that is one sexy-looking test build my friend :D Gawd, I want one of these, lol.

Thanks for sharing all that info pertaining to the process, btw!

I have no skill, experience or software for that sort of thing, so your post was very comprehensive and informative.
 
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Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Nothing terribly exciting tonight. I milled out a pocket for the holo-imager button. The body is now almost ready for casting.

20150129_083920312_iOS.jpg

And painted the first round of my Geordi PADD (for the six hundred and twelfth time), in what is probably a controversial color. I'll probably end up doing a second darker round after I see what it looks like when dry, but I am definitely going for a fairly light purplish pink color. What can I say? This is how it often looks to me on screen. :unsure But I probably overdid the lightness here. I feel like the lighting environment at the Artisan's Asylum is weird. I might start mixing paints here at home, where I also have access to a color calibration monitor. I tend to mix colors off of references on my Surface at the workshop, and they end up looking quite different. Oh well.

20150129_085433398_iOS.jpg

20150129_084634605_iOS.jpg

(It's one bottle of Golden High Flow pearl white paint with 40 drops of Alzarin Crimson Hue and 23 drop of Transparent Dioxazine Purple.)
 
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Re: Norbauer's Notebook - adventures in recreational Star Trek (mostly) prop replicat

Wow. That Inkscape issue would drive me 100% bat$h|t. At Techshop we have a different laser cutter and we just print straight from Illustrator. I save all my work to my Dropbox, so I can just download it right there at the laser station, set up the print in the printer settings, and off we go. Any changes I make I just save and upload back to my Dropbox. We have Inkscape on the machines there, but now that I've read your post, I'm just not going to bother. Illustrator's worked for me for almost 20 years.

Same idea at the Makerbot, though because they're not hooked up to computers, there's a little SD card-based sneakernet to be dealt with. But I can make my part in Blender, pull it into the Makerbot software on my Mac, slice it, and save it to the SD card, all here at home.

I'm never more frustrated than when I have to fight bad software to get something done. I make stuff to lower my stress...
 
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