Hey guys, welcome back, I'm Geoff this is Stuff I Made, this is part 2 of the
Hotwire Foam Cutter build. If you got comments / questions drop them down below.
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So this piece of Aluminium stock that I'm cutting now is going to
be used at the point where the nichrome wire comes out through the base of the
table, this means I can drill is very fine
accurate hole for the wire so when the arm tilts it doesn't move the distance
of perhaps if I use the washer and the hole was bigger but also the the Aluminium
can act as a bit of a heatsink but to ensure it's at 90 degrees so it's flush
to the table 90 degrees to its side I've drilled a hole in the scrap piece of
wood and sanded and tested and sanded and tested until I'm happy with the
accuracy. Using a center find I mark the center of the aluminium hole punch it
and then drill a 1.5 millimeter hole all the way through. After ensuring that the
arm is at 90 degrees to the table I take down the points but the wire will drop
down to the table at 90 degrees, drill a center hole and using the aluminium heat
sink through and the piece of scrap wood with the hole in it I can place the
drill bit through the hole position the aluminium exactly where it's going to be
as you can see now and then clamp down that piece of wood and this will create
a guide for the Forstner Bit. It was my intent to only drill partway through the
base and sink the aluminium into that but I soon realized that it would be
better to drill all the way through the table and then have the ability to push
the aluminium up and down from underneath. Now I do chip the Formica
because I'm drilling without the template now and so what I end up doing
is drilling a slightly wider hole partway down that will later fill with
resin so the glue gives me about 10 seconds working time so using two
shims of paper on flat surface I push up from underneath
and when I pour the resin the aluminium and the thickness of the paper
or we have to sand that away back flat to the base of the laminate so I'm just
secure with some superglue and then just leveling the base to ensure that when I
pour the resin it's as flat as possible
so this is a fast cast resin
same as the epoxy knobs, if you saw part one So I just try and pour this slowly
but just so it gives a meniscus above the aluminium, it's easy enough to sand
down, and I think this was a reasonable repair. To be honest i would have been fine
just leaving the chip but it would have bugged me. Where the hole in the aluminium
is I have used a countersink bit by hand just to soften it the very top edge to
ensure the wire doesn't get snagged when using the arm to angle the wire. Okay so
I dimension and sand the walnut for the front face and now I'm just working out
button positions and the like. So I decided to use
a latching button and now I'm just creating a holder for that which will
allow me to position the button behind it and then glue a piece of thin
aluminium stock to it to act as the button itself. I drill all the way
through the walnut with the small bit there so I have a reference hole on both
sides that when I drill in with this bigger a bit I can flip the piece of work get a
clean cut on each side and still get all the way through and then the two holes
are for the on/off button and for the potentiometer to adjust the amps and
now I'm just cutting the stock for the potentiometer and drilling a hole into
the top of this piece of aluminium so that I can glue in or epoxy in the
potentiometer and they're just polishing up. After drilling the holes I mark up
for cutting an angle and this is because I want the slope to the front, i want a
dynamic angle with the buttons extruding straight through it and using the offcut
use it to support the base while sanding and now I'm just marking up for the
amp meter which you see in the background there which is a little case that slot into
this hole so I take it back up together and this will make it a lot easier to
chisel out that space so the first thing I do is just chisel into that knife line
a little bit just to define it and then I'll take out at the drill press and hog
out most of the stock using a drill, unfortunately i didn't video most of that,
the battery died so you just see me put the drill bit down
I do drill that out and here you see me just tidying it up a little bit with
a chisel and a mallet. I apologise for the state that my chisel there, but I came back from a
holiday and it had taken quite a bit of rust and I hadn't cleaned up in time for this
video. They are in a much better condition now though. So just test fit the knobs and and the amp meter
just to see how it looks and from the
back there potentiometer attached and the hole for the latch switch and now
I just um polish it up with some beeswax and just
want to see how it looks really
okay so just clamping the walnut so that the main unit now and I'm using the
offcut to help support a piece of plywood to pull it in tight
I'm using four pocket holes on the top and in a second you'll see some two
brackets that I use to pull it in a little bit tighter as well this is more
than enough to hold it in place and then you can get a better look at the
latching switch and it's unit holding it together it's just loosely placed there
for spacing and you can see the back of the hole for the amp meter there where the
connectors will go. So I'm drilling now the counter holes to fix this latching
switch holder and i'm using some liquid weld superglue to hold the aluminium to it.
So for the potentiometer I decided to use some five-minute epoxy because it'll
have a rotational force on it so just mix up the equal parts of the epoxy, drop
it into the hole I'm pushing the potentiometer you can see there the
potentiometer already has an angle bracket on for fixing it in front of the
walnut. So I'm just drilling out a space and chiseling out for the female power
connector so it's accessible from the back and then just literally hammer that
into place so the wires for this just being tinned a little bit of solder and
then screw for only its place using some heat sink to protect the cable
so it just marking up to afix the circuit board to the base and it's a
motor controller circuit board so the switch that's attached to the two red
wires and black wires is a reversing switch but I take that off later and I
hard wire in so just this set to one direction. I'm using little plastic
washers just to lift the circuit board off the base just to protect the back of it.
So use these plastic electrical connectors just to hold wires in place
sometimes the wire runs all the way through without being cut and
screwed in place and sometimes where I need to tap into it screw them down so
I'm just ending on that clips onto here so that I can attach to the latching
switch. So from the power supply it runs all the way up the sid e to this and then
I think I cut another clip here now and just fix it in so that I can take power
from the latching switch that on to the circuit board but this gives me the
ability then to cable in lights that don't need to run off the other side of
the circuit board. The lights are a direct on or off and I don't need to
adjust the voltage on those. So now I'm just putting some clip ends on -
I'm not sure all these things are called, connectors onto the lighting wire
the two wires you see their lights, but look
what I'm going to do at the end of this video towards the end of it this have
some still footage of the whole back of this and just talk through all the
electrics in a bit more detail and just walk you through everything that's on
here. So I'll just I tell you what I'm doing as I'm doing it and then summarise
in a bit more detail at the end. So yeah I've just cabled in the lights and
that's the two wires that run back out the left-hand side of that white box
there and come back down this side. Now what I'm doing here is making the device
that will hold the nichrome wire below the base of the table so you can see
there's a threaded insert I'm gluing the two pieces that work together and
that threaded of the insert will hold a bolt which you'll see in a second and
that bolt will have a combination of some nuts, some washers and one of the epoxy
knobs I made earlier, or resin knobs I made earlier and that will allow me to loosen
quickly and clamp between washers the wire and you'll see all that in it in a minute.
So the little wire i'm making now is for connecting the bolts to something that's
called a shunt which then connects to the amp and voltmeter continues on the power
supply that makes the circuit effectively this will connect to that black
thing on the right to the bolt and then the wire the nichrome wire then through
the table. Sorry for my hands being in the way, but you can see the bolt
just going through the threading the insert and in a second you'll see a few
nuts and washers going on there just to set the position and the clamping plates
which are washers for the nichrome wire
S o I have my pencil lines as a reference for this for the edge of this plywood on
the right hand side and it looks a bit random I'm screwing it down elbows screw
the first one and pivoted slightly unscrewing the second one says directly
above the hole so a couple of the elements you haven't seen me wiring into
the foot pedal and also the port on the side and the power switch for the volt
and ammeter and when I show you the electrics diagram or the electrics at
the end and talk through it it'll make sense so I'm now using a multimeter on
continuity setting to test the validity of the circuits I'm just working my way
around each point of the circuit and just listening for a beat basically to
make sure it's a complete circuit and the piece that I'm about to touch now
that's where the reversing switch was and you can see that I've just hardwired
that to be in one direction so if you're in the market for a decent multimeter
this one is a fluke but it's for the Chinese market so it's a lot cheaper
it's a really decent quality multimeter but for a fraction of the pop of the
price like I say I'll leave the model number
in the notes below so now I'm just attaching the nitric and wire 100 and
that will now feed over that group on the micro gesture there and this whole
system I have set up right now that you're seeing changes again because I
want a quick-release system so that I can release the nichrome wire hope you
threw a hole make a center cut through the center of an O for example so rather
than using a washer with the nichrome wire round on it I upgrade to this
system which I came up with and this is a long hex nut and a bolt and I drill
fine hole through the bolts so that it comes out of the shoulder with where the
thread and the back of the ball meet and you'll see why in a second I can thread
the nichrome wire through this hole it's a little bit fiddly to drill personally
and they go there but you can thread the nichrome wire through that hole quite
easily and then tighten up the nut and that's how the wire is held so
marking up and cutting that long bolt to be a bit shorter longer than normal nut
but shorter than that to reduce the weight but still give enough grip my
finger to tighten and loosen the bolt and I just tidy up one end where I've
cut it and now I'm just preparing to drill a hole through one end and this
will allow me to attach it to a spring as part of the tensioning mechanism so
this is the spring now I'm attaching to but once again you'll see later that I'm
not happy with this tensioning system that some I I create a quick-release
tensioner as well as quick way of attaching the wire or address it tool
toolless a way of attaching applying tension to it
so right now I just pull back and I use an allen key words yeah I wasn't happy
with this process plus I felt that the weight of that bolt would rest down on
the aluminium or these the micro adjust the bolts there here you can see the
final setups you can see the wire entering the bolts with them with the
nuts to tighten it attached to the spring that the rep then runs back to an
extended bolts and long enough holding it onto a repurposed bike wheel quick
release lever apologies I didn't video the making of that piece but effectively
there's a hole drilled in one end of its holder the long nut and where the long
bolt would go into it nor meter through the wheel it's a much shorter bolt that
happens to have a head that fits into the track of the aluminium so basically
it's a cam lever
and here you can see how easy it is to set wire to 90 degrees so using a
carpenter square in this instance just just the micro gesture okay now to
explain the electrics in a bit more detail firstly an apology for the mess
that you're looking at I'm not an electrician and I'm sure some of you
will be unsubscribing right now so these two wires are the main power in to the
latching switch the output side of the switch then continues on to the motor
controller board and here's a close-up of the controller board and you can see
there's a reversing switch in a potentiometer there's a power in on the
left and the power out on the right for the pasta gate positive and negatives I
will put a link below in the comments as to where I got this from so these cables
here are for the LED lights they come directly out from the matching switch by
this little Y electric connector they don't need to be dimmable so they don't
need to run through the controller at all use every move the reversing switch
and I've hardwired it to have a single polarity the power supply continues out
of the board on towards the foot pedal and this is the foot pedal that I used
I'll leave a link in the description below
I don't need the red and white wire were required to put it on off functionality
so the negative output goes all the way around back to the top of the arm where
the nichrome wire meets the tensioner it also Forks to join the yellow wire on
the Volt an ammeter and here's a view of the underside of the ammeter you can see
that there's a yellow wire a thin red a thin black a thick red and a thick black
and I'll explain each of those as we go I'll leave a link to where I got this as
well the vultan amp meter uses a separate power supply I found that if I
try to use the same power supply straight from the latching switch that
the voltmeter work that the amp meter didn't with this configuration of the
separate power supply it does work it works very well so the thin red and the
thin black is what controls the power supply to the ammeter and here you can
see it connecting to this little battery box via a switch
previously I mentioned the wire coming out of the board all the way back to the
pivoting L well this is the route that it takes we were zoomed in before but
trying to show you that well the wire from the arm re-enters the board just
here and follow this route through something called a shunt all the way
back to the meter by the red wire now the shunt is part of the meter comes
with it and it allows the meter to accurately measure the volts and amps I
don't know much more than that to be honest
following the black wire back out the meter it comes around to the other side
of the shunt through the shunt and then back onto the foot pedal so the last
piece is this little add-on port it taps into the wire going up to the top of the
arm and also the wire joining at the bottom of the table ideally I look great
this to a be thicker wire the feet have an on/off switch so much disables one or
the other circuit okay so that's it it's going rate and the S note that last bits
a bit rushed hopefully it makes sense if not ask me
questions in the comments I'll try and answer them all don't forget to
subscribe there's more stuff coming see you soon
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