We caught a beautiful stretch of dry, cool weather for our second Camp at Jim Hansen’s shop in Mystic, CT. Even though the day started out a bit chilly it soon became sunny enough for us to
understand why Jim chose to “upgrade” his shop since our last visit with a large ( 10KW) array of solar panels which are used to power his entire shop ( see above) . He has a great ,open Southern exposure which lets him capture enough sunlight to provide an “excess”of electricity which his local utility will buy back from him. Rather than store all of this excess power in a battery bank Jim is inter tied to the local electric grid, and he is creating much more power than he’s been using in his shop. With federal, and state incentives helping out, he will amortize his investment in about 6-7 years, and after that he’s in a total profit mode….
A number of this year’s Campers have been to multiple Shopbot events, ( we had two other Camp hosts there) and we got right into some sessions about what people have been doing recently;
Todd Maci has a new product he’s been developing; beer mash paddles. These are used during the fermentation phase of the beer making process, and Todd has worked up a few different designs he’ll be marketing. In addition to coming up with some business ideas we also discussed ways Todd can build a dedicated vacuum jig for holding his paddles while they are being cut. We then got into a larger discussion about different types of vacuum setups, for different types of products.
Jim Christianson brought in some samples of moldings he has been developing on his Shopbot. He’s cutting sample sections, then using the Shopbot probe to generate .dxf files which he then runs through the Shopbot extruder for cutting files. Jim brought up some vectorizing questions which got the group into going through various demos of which software packages might be best for creating future files for this type of work.
There were a couple of first time visitors at this Camp and they had a large number of questions about how the Shopbot might be used for different types of work, ranging from the cutting of boat kits, to doing 3 dimensional work. This brought up the “100kgarages” project which might allow at least one of the newbies to get his business up and running through the help of a local Shopbotter.We also went over some ways that 3D files can be developed in a variety of software packages, as well as being scanned.
Our host Jim H. showed us a simple device he built to keep his router bits running cool. It’s a air fitting he made from tubing, and it runs off of a fitting on his shop air compressor. Jim also showed some of the flooring inlays he’s been doing over the last year most of which have a marine theme (being in Mystic, it’s only natural…), and he showed us his teak grate process.
There were a couple of other software “how to?”questions and we spoke about a number of programs which the group is currently using which ranged from the old “Vector”program to a number of Aspire users. We got into the process of making lithophanes, and using “Photo V Carve” to do “portraits” from photographs. A couple of people saw the benefits of upgrading their current software when they became aware of the new features that the current Vectric packages contain, including the slicing and 4 sided machining capabilities of “Cut 3D”.
And we spent part of our lunch session cutting out the soon to be famous “Linker Log deer” files
which are becoming a fixture at all of the Fall Camps. After seeing the process a couple of Campers went off with the idea of starting to make a few for the upcoming holidays…..
As the Camp drew to a close Jim walked us over to one of his solar array display panels, and we got to see that it had “acquired”28KW of power during our time inside the shop…..
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