What is Acraglass? I could make a clay form and cast hydrocal which I still have a ton of.
While this wasn't an exercise day, I still didn't get into the shop until almost 3 p.m. I did get some stuff accomplished. I got the parking sign down except for the lighting and got that half done. I successfully printed 6 sign bases. I've said before that the EPAX Non-FEP film is forgiving and today was a perfect example. I had a adhesion failure last print, pulled the vat, peeled off the stuck resin, put a thin film of teflon oil on the film, filled it up and printed it again. And all six printed perfectly. With the Elegoo film, if it had the hazing and bumpiness of this film, I would have had to replace it.
I got a coat of dullcoat on the parking lot and it took off enough sheen to make it quite workable.
While I pulled up Saulena's to mark the new power lead hole position, I found that it was falling apart. It was the first craftsman kit I built for the layout in 2005 so it's 15 years old. Everything in the base was delaminating. I mean everything; foam core, play, building 1st floor… you get the picture. I had to apply glue to all the gaps and clamp it so put it back together. I had to put a window back together too. These things don't last forever and all the more reason to NEVER GLUE YOUR BUILDING AND STRUCTURES TO THE LAYOUT. If I had, I couldn't have fixed this.
I tried using my decals on the parking lot sign. The decal was slightly larger than the side and I didn't like how it looked. Also the color saturation was not so hot. So I went to plan B, which was to reprint the signage on Photo paper, and it was much better. I used 3M Scotch Double-sided Permanent Tape to hold the sign image onto the styrene substrate.
Here was the decal attempt.
And here was the sign using the photo paper method. Much better.
Here's the sign just stuck in its hole. It won't be this high when finally fixed.
Here are six printed bases in the post-cure box. I'm curing then before finishing off the bottoms. I printed them directly on the plate so there are no support nubs to deal with. The bolt heads rendered perfectly. After sanding off the pre-coat layer on their bottoms I will re-drilled the 3/16" hole to accept the sign post.
I spent the rest of the afternoon making the two LED lights that will illuminate the sign from both sides. I'm having a problem soldering magnet wire to the Surface Mount LEDs. I keep killing them with the heat. I got one head done successfully after killing one LED, and then killed two more trying to solder the second light head. I just stopped and quit for the day. They're not that expensive, less than a buck per, but it bugs me. Then I thought about simply sacrificing a couple of the street lights which are already wired and working successfully. I don't need 10 of them. I'm going to go that route tomorrow and stop messing around.
I ran into a problem with that new min-chop saw I got from MicroMark. It's suffering the same problem that I've had with other tools of Chinese manufacture. Their Allen screws have lousy metallurgy. I had to replace a set of vat screws on the printer with Torx metric screws of the same size because the hex-holes in the screws rounded out, making them useless. The same thing has happened to the button-head Allen screw that holds on the saw blade. I've only change out the blade two times. And today could not remove the screw because it had cammed out. I sharpened the Allen wrench since it too had rounded over, but it didn't work. Went to a slightly larger inch-sized wrench and it didn't work either. Because it's a button head, there was nothing to grab with the vise-grip. So right now I have no way of changing the saw blade.
I'm a good mechanic. I don't over-tighten things. I've taught hundreds of kids about how NOT to do that. As the saw was cutting it tightened the screw further, which it's supposed to do. But, it should not be removable after only two blade changes. I'm going to contact MicroMark and see what they can do. If you go on Amazon, you see this exact saw being sold by many importers. I guarantee that I'm not the only fellow who's having this problem.
