you made a beautiful azimuth ring with a mark for each degree but the pointer line doesn't do it justice. the pointer should be fine enough to split each degree. yes, I know it doesn't matter but its principal! amazing work. its easy for me to poke fun from this keyboard.
The original plan was to make a stainless pointer and engrave a 0.2 degree incremental Vernier scale and magnifier. That will be a future upgrade, but it needs a bit of care about dealing with grit, water and oil. Soon as my CNC machine is up and running, I'll be able to do that much more easily. Also I need to do a detailed calibration of the scale to make sure there aren't any weird inconsistencies. ALso the pointer needs to be flush with the ring. I did consider using an engraved and filled 0.1 mm line on the underside of a clear plate, and I might just try that. In reality though, those dishes have a 3 degree beamwidth at X band, so any more than "about a degree" precision is a bit pointless. The next iteration is for much higher frequencies, and will have a remotely operated geared adjustment for fine tuning once locked. That will be for dishes 250 mm diameter at 134 GHz, which need a much more precise pointing. This is great for testing thermal noise from the Sun in the 5 to 30 GHz range or my outdoor antenna range when I'm characterising antenna feeds
@@MachiningandMicrowaves Even on X band, when you're at the limit of your sensitivity on a very weak signal that 3 degree beamwidth shrinks to a fraction of a degree. You'll be glad to have repeatable 1/4 degree resolution.
@@stargazer7644 Yeah, I use a differential GPS baseline and 14 bit Hall encoder on the real systems. There's a friction lock to spin the whole assembly, but having the scale free-rotating with three lockscrews would certainly make better sense, as would a vernier scale. The DGPS with a 5 metre baseline is remarkably accurate and doesn't depend on having horizon reference landmarks. Ultimately though, this was a try to see if that laser was useful. I use the CNC mill for scales these days, so that tells its own story I guess. The laser is great for logos and labelling, but line scales are better engraved
@@MachiningandMicrowaves When you say DGPS, do you mean RTK (Real-time kinematic) GPS? Or something different? DGPS in the US is a system run by the Coast Guard using reference stations transmitting on the very low MF band to defeat Selective Availability back when that was a thing.
@@stargazer7644 differential with two receivers linked over a 5 to 10 metre baseline. A few folks in the US and Australia and EU are using a similar setup. It gives me a reasonably good reference baseline to zero the absolute rotary Hall encoder. Still not good enough at 122GHz but it works in the dark and places with featureless horizons. There was an article about it in DUBUS a few years ago. I should clean it up a bit and do a vid about it
Lasers used to bleach dyes definitely make sense as it is the problem that most dye lasers have when pumped at high powers. Cool to see this used for a useful purpose.
It was a nice engineering approach. I did a very similar holder with the bearing. As it was very easy to rotate I have experienced problems during windy days, so I had to create a brake with adjustable brake power to deal with it. 73!
I've surprised myself about what it can be used for. Simple things like laying out a sheet metal cutting/banding pattern to make a standard-gain horn, or a conical horn are just so easy now
I'm on a steep learning curve with my new SYIL X5 CNC, making the first parts now, so hope to get a few vids out soon showing the staggering depths of my incompetence and the fumbling inadequacies of my Fusion360 CAM work. Should be hilarious.
I'm mot going to have hysterics over counterboring with an end mill, since I'm the sort of Philistine who occasionally does it with a Pilot-Point drill bit. 😜
I would have made the scale rotatable on the mount with a friction locking nut or lever. As it is, you're going to have to move the entire tripod or loosen and rotate the mount to calibrate the pointer with true north. With a rotating scale you just find a known source, release the lock and spin the scale until it aligns correctly with the pointer and lock it down again. That also avoids the screws in the scale face.
Ah, the endless and unfruitful task faced by Geometers since Time Immemorial... Which is September 3rd 1189 in UK law. Richard the Lionheart's reign. So actually very recent in geometry.
Out of curiosity, did you type the subtitles or are they automatically generated? Korloy is in there - correctly - and I'd be impressed if the automatic caption system recognized that somewhat niche term.
I generated them in Davinci Resolve, then did a manual edit to remove some awkward line splits. It generated Corloy and Hawley instead of Korloy and Horley, and made a mess of a few other phrases, but it's remarkably good compared with the YT cloud service
Any reason you went for rolling element bearings rather than bushes and thrust washers from a bearing plastic (or my favourites, teflon sintered bushes)? Hardly a high speed rotation, and not even full rotations at that...
Purely because it was originally going to be an an offcuts build, made from odds and sods. The bearings were in a box of donated bits, I was going to use a rusty old 3/4 inch threaded bar from a field gate hinge as the shaft, and a bit of aluminium plate with odd holes in that I recovered from an old amplifier, but it turned out to be too narrow, so that ended up as the polishing mandrel. For a production version, I'd use bushes for certain. Maybe stainless on UHMWPE, or indeed some fancy sintered bushes and thrust washers
The endmills in chucks debate usually lacks the nuance of what you're doing with it; straight down into aluminum is much different to cutting sideways, in tougher materials or both.
Also it makes a difference if the chuck has a drawbar and if there's a Jacobs taper or something solid. I wouldn't try it with a 3/4" end mill in a drill press with a Morse taper and no drawbar. Although it might make for a decent video
Yes, this little project was so I could try multiple different processes to make marked metal rings. That is for a sponsored video I'm making for Creality about their desktop lasers. The rings all use the same design, but show different techniques and materials.
@@MachiningandMicrowavesHigh performance and PL259 was something I didn't think I'd ever hear in the same breath. (Unless talking to the HF wallahs... But we don't talk to them!)
@@gonzo_the_great1675 I tend to think of radio from VLF to UHF as slowly-varying DC that you can watch on a basic oscilloscope. Shielded banana plugs like the PL-259 are pretty decent at DC apart from the weird connection of the shield. Now if they had a consistent three-point tapered connection and a proper nut that you could torque up to get a really nice gas-tight non-rocking connection, that might be quite decent, but a DIN connector has that completely solved. Still might be fun to try though
