It’s spring, all of our parts are in and we are ready to start assembly of the new line of Ohm64 controllers. 

Not so fast. We took about a week to clean up and organize our shop. Running a small manufacturing outfit can sometimes be (ok always be) extremely fast pace and hectic. You can always see parts and projects in various stages, wood flying from the mulling machine, solder paste next to your lunch in the fridge, and Thundercloud Subs (great local sub spot near the shop) soda cups all over. Travis, Jay, Gabe, Dell, and Dan cleaned, organized, and make everything pretty for the arrival of parts and components to start production. People are always asking to see where we make our controllers, so here it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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news by Jay

Until about a month ago we used to have to go to a local waterjet company to have the face plates of the Ohm cut. We have been talking for a while about brining most if not all of our manufacturing in-house, but getting our own water jet just to cut faceplates didn’t seem to make sense. We already have one CNC machine to mill wood, plastics, and soft materials, and another to assemble printed circuit boards, but really had no way to cut metal. We talked last year about cutting metal with our wood cnc machine, but that would tie it up because metal takes a long time to mill using drill bits. It would also require a coolant system, so the moisture would not play well with our wood work. Travis came up with a solution and built us our very own metal milling CNC machine that we call “Metal Bot”.

Since we plan on cutting metals only on this machine it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to cut each piece. We are currently cutting the faceplates of the Ohm64 using aluminum in about 30 minutes. There is a nice timelapse of a faceplate being cut that can be viewed here. When we finally tweaked our machine to create very accurate cuts, I shot some video of Travis explaining how it works. In this video you can see the very first faceplate being cut for our prototypes, and Travis talking about it.

Since this video was shot we built Metal Bot her very own room, and I will shoot some production video of the production faceplates being milled.

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news by Jay

Travis has been building a new CNC machine to cut the aluminum faceplates. We have been contracting this part of production out, but we are bringing it in-house when this machine is finished.
The ShopBot that mills the wood bodies isn’t fit for this job because cutting metal requires a cooling bath. In this video you can see the coolant dousing the bit, along with the source of coolant at the bottom:

Unfortunately, this test run ended in a bit of disaster, as Travis described in his email:

“After making all the modifications to stiffen up the z-axis and install the re-circulating flood coolant system, our new machine made its first quality cutting today. I made about 1/3rd of the cutouts and then, disaster. To no fault of its own, the top z-axis mount came loose and buried the bit in the table.”
The “fault” was an attempt at making do with a cheap bearing mount. Nothing $15 won’t fix!
We are looking forward to that fix so we can start producing!
Sadly, this video doesn’t have the disaster in it. But it’s pretty cool anyway.
Here’s a pic of the failure:

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news by Peter