We visited John Haggerty’s shop in Souderton, PA again, and got to see a number of new projects he, and Bob Dodd have been experimenting with over the last year. The majority of “Campers”at this one were new to the machine, or had never seen one before, and they got a very well rounded ‘tour”of the machine, and it’s capabilities.
Bob Dodd brought in some of his latest projects which ranged from bending fluorescent plastics, to cutting small ( 1/32″bit) components for doll houses ( see above) . Bob also has been testing a variety of exterior coatings for foam, and he brought in some samples of styrofoam coated with a product called “Styrospray 1000”. Bob also explained some of his techniques for doing rotary work on a number of shop built indexers he has created over the years.
Our host John has a shop full of “eclectic” projects ranging anywhere from a rack of noses he sells to people who need a place to stash their eyeglasses, to some serious mold making jobs that ranged from small statues to a cannon from the 1700’s…!
Much of John’s work this past year has been concentrated on the concept of making a variety of molds to increase his production capabilities, and he showed us some of his ‘poured corbels’ as well as some other pieces that involved using his machine to generate large numbers of pieces for other companies. He had just finished up a large “run” of egg and dart molding strips built out of HDU before we began the Camp.
John is also dabbling into the kind of jobs that others would turn down because of the complexity of creating specific shapes. He even “invented” a roller system which allowed him to turn a crank, and “bend” strips of zinc into an customer specified molding shape to use as an edge accent on a custom bar installation. And John’s Shopbot ( a 2002 PRT) is anything but “stock” as he has embellished it over the years with a variety of clamping, and indexing features , which gives him the ability to do repeatable shapes in volume.
All of the above helped to answer some of the questions our other Campers had about ways to incorporate the machine into some ideas they were considering as business opportunities, so we also got into a discussion about “what do you do after you get an idea in your mind for a product?”.
For some more info on these projects please look at the pix on the Camp Flickr page- http://www.flickr.com/photos/campshopbot/sets/72157625231286710/with/5111186448/
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