Long Overdue Update!
Ok, so it’s been a crazy year since the last update. I changed day jobs and went from a 10 mile rural commute to a 45 mile commute to downtown Atlanta. And, I’m in the final classes to finally finish my engineering degree. So, I fell a little behind on updating the website. But, the shop was still very busy, and I took pictures along the way!
First up was a project that came up last fall. I was approached by a premier manufacturer of marimbas (a percussion musical instrument) to make the bent resonator tubes. These tubes are large – 3.5″ and 4″ OD tube up to almost 6 feet long. They wanted to bend the 3.5″ on an 8″ CLR and the 4″ on 8 and 10″ CLR’s. Commercially available tooling was prohibitively expensive, so I worked out a modular system that minimized material and machining costs. These dies are huge and heavy! I’ll show the tubes in a future post.
I also worked out an interesting solution for the mandrel where I sleeved a much smaller mandrel in nylon plus a way to cast my own wiper dies.
