Turning disc of phenolic

The trompette only sounds when (a) the wheel is being turned forward and (b) the wheel is being turned faster. The player can silence the buzzing of the trompette simply by turning the wheel more slowly.

This isn't a connection I'm familiar with - can you describe it to me?

Thanks,

Alden

[more useful advice deleted]

Yeah, I keep mine on the floor under the electronics bench, so that I can put it DOWN after use. ;-)

Correct.

Ah - either famous or infamous...

A

[ ... ]

*Nice* rendering!

That sounds good to me. If fitted to something like that, it should be very repeatable on any refitting. Of course, the making of the shafts in reasonable quantities (e.g. onesey-twosey per setup) would be a bit of a pain -- especially on a small machine. A bit of a runout gap between the threads and the taper would be a bit easier to handle on a non-CNC machine, and getting the taper just right might also be a pain. (It looks short enough to do on the compound, so if you did a wheel and a shaft with the same compound setup, that should work -- until the next batch which might be different if the compound setting were to be changed for other work. (E,g, for cutting the thread. :-)

It also might be hard to start to unscrew, since you've got the taper fighting you.

Is that why you had the neatly rendered shaft image handy, or did you do this just for the reply?

Enjoy, DoN.

What would be nice would be a reamer to produce the precise taper in the wheel, so all you would need would be to set the compound to match each time. Or, with a more gentle taper, you could leave it set up on a taper attachment. I would suggest using a Morse taper as the standard, so you could use relatively inexpensive reamers. Probably a MT-1 (big end) or MT-2 (small end). Any larger would be too big, I think.

Bear in mind that the rim of the wheel is bowing strings, which are vibrating tangent to the rim of the wheel, and the friction is tailored with a coating of rosin (same as for a fiddle bow), so this is acting a bit like a tiny impact wrench -- lots of repeated pressure spikes which would probably tighten the wheel up during playing, and thus make things difficult to start free afterwards. I would personally feel happier with a nut -- but one whose gripping surfaces could be disguised as a decorative feature. For example, start with a cylinder, and drill eight or twelve holes parallel to the axis around the cylinder from one end (not going all the way through). Then turn it to about a

20-30 degree taper, until you come out below the holes at the small end. Then a matching female cone, with two or three inserted pins of drill rod would give a nice grip on the cone, and it would all *look* like decoration. The female cone could perhaps be an incomplete circle, like a 'C', so it could be slipped on over the extension of the shaft to the final bearing)

Of course, I am not the original poster, I just got mixed up in this because I've helped build these things in the past (not nearly so nice as his, though.)

[ ... ]

O.K. What software are you using? (I'll bet that it is one of the Windows-based ones, so I can't run it. :-) And how long did it take you to get that fast?

Enjoy, DoN.

I'd be concerned that a Morse taper would be too difficult to release without anything to work against. I think you'd want the taper to be just barely self locking.

Yeah, I was wondering about that when I replied before, but have a hard time imagining it would get awfully tight, but then my experience with hurdy-gurdys is limited to watching "Captains Courageous".

You'd win that bet, it's Autodesk Inventor, and Autodesk is pretty much in bed with Microsoft. There were a lot of unhappy folks when they dropped support for Apple several years ago, and despite a lot of pressure to port to Linux, I don't see it happening any time soon.

Someone here was trying out Alibre and seemed to be happy with it. IIRC it was around $500 vs. around $4000 for Inventor, Solidworks, Solid Edge, and the like.

Ned Simmons

That sounds good -- but you would need to be able to disguise the holes as decoration (and I had a branch of the thread (or was it an e-mail branch?) in which I had a circle of holes in the nut parallel to the axis, and then the nut is turned to a cone, leaving the holes as decorative ribbing -- but something which could be gripped by a special design wrench. Perhaps *all* of those holes could go all the way through, reducing the amount you need to rotate the nut before you line up. But you would need a piece to fit on the cone and provide a square surface for the screw head to operate against.

Or -- there could be a shoulder *behind* the wheel (which is where we were before we got to the taper idea) against which the tips of the screws could bear for extraction.

[ ... ]

Kind of like the sailors keeping a concertina in good condition at sea. :-) The expensive English system concertinas were really out of the reach of the sailors price-wise anyway. And what was far more likely to be used at see were cheap (e.g. $1.00-$3.00, depending on the period) one-row button accordions. Dead simple to play -- at least to sort of accompany your singing when relaxing off-duty. Cheap enough to replace after every voyage. (There were also cheap German-made concertinas, which might have been within reach, but like the accordions, they would die by the end of the voyage -- probably even when given extraordinary care.)

[ ... ]

Similar sound, except that the bagpipes (at least the Scottish warpipes) are *loud*, while this is a more polite indoor instrument. There are "polite" bagpipes in several cultures.

[ ... ]

They are -- and I've examined an antique one once, part of the display collection in a rather good music store in Washington D.C.

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

:-)

My Sun Ultra-2 has a Creator-3D card in it, which should be quite nice, if I can get the programs to use it. It is things like this that make me use the Sun as the keyboard/display and leave the program (which was written for Intel-based linux) on a linux box across the net. It might be worthwhile boosting that link to 100BaseT instead of

10BaseT.

They want to *sell* them, and linux users are a notoriously poor market. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Take a look at CadKey ...

I am about 1/4 down the page taking out a "printed" stereolithograpy part that I designed in CadKey.

and their educational distributor If you are a student or staff/teacher, k - college, you can get the latest version for very little. It is a very good program for about $190. This is the full program. The only restriction is that you do not use it for commercial projects.

It does 3D, Parametric, Skinning, and much more. It will import: IGES, DFX, DWG, IGES (one pass), STEP, ACIS SAT, Parasolid, and STL files. It will export: all of the above plus GIF, WMF, Uniplot, VRML (Picture it), and SLA (Picture it).

I teach at a middle school and am piloting a class in CAD at the middle school (7th and 8th grade) level this year. I used it last year as part of a

6th grade class.

I went to the TecEdu "summer camp" and got the latest program for going to the class. Next year I intend to take the classes offered in SurfCam and Chief Architect.

Good question, easy answer: you never hear him play it. The sound is dubbed in, and it's not even a hurdy-gurdy playing, it's an orchestra sounding not even remotely like a HG. The most you hear from the instrument itself is a heart-rending "thump" when Manuel puts it down a bit too hard.

Almost exactly like bagpipes, but with a rhythmic buzzing.

We probably know the guy: Matt Szostak lives in Camden, and is one of the few professional HG makers in the US. (The other ones all live in our house.)

Alden