Welcome, and thank you for your informative posts.
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Reality looks increasingly like 3D renderings of the nineties.
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Hey, that’s exactly the (constructivist) idea behind my photography! Glad I’m not alone… but it must be a bias, right? If you spend enough time looking at 90s 3D, you are bound to find it anywhere? Or is it real?
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Very nice.
I sometimes genuinely feel like reality is badly textured, wrongly lit, has unrealistic shadows or unbelievable reflections. Then I remember it’s reality.
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Unless a suitable metal/alloy were chosen I suspect that human contact alone would become a problem. We don’t have Alien acid blood or anything; but the salt-and-mixed-biological coming out of our pores isn’t so good for most metals; and with tolerances like these finding a coating whose thickness doesn’t screw things up; and which doesn’t wear away after a number of rounds of surface/surface contact would be just loads of fun…
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And it isn’t even new technology.
Blockquote
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening every day
– Oscar Hammerstein II, “Cinderella”
Very informative post, thanks!
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You know those puzzles where you have a solid cube made up of numerous pieces with no obvious way to disassemble them? I want one of those made using this process.
I also want a regular old solid cube of metal to give to people I don’t like when they ask to try it.
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From the logo shown on the parts, looks like these are demonstration pieces by Jindiao Precision Machinery. Their website http://www.jingdiao.com/en/characteristic-solutions/highlight_en.html shows that they are a CNC maker, and sells CNC equipment and software, so I doubt the parts are EDM’d. The site says that their machine can achieve a resolution of 0.5 micron. If true (and the video seems to proof it), parts coming together can visually look seamless. EDM, though accurate, create textured surfaces that requires polishing. Very often, it is the polishing step that throws the accuracy off, not to mention that EDM electrodes themselves need to be created first by CNC!
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Just wait until the vaporwave ＡＥＳＴＨＥＩＣ becomes reality.
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I love Supreme Skills - the enthusiasm and excitement in the voice over is quite infectious!1111!!!1!!elebenty!11!!!
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This.
There are extremely rare CNC machines that could conceivably make something like this but they are not something you will ever find with any frequency.
NixieBunny above mentioned Kern- those are one of the few makes that might be able to achieve something like this but only if they use the jig grinding attachment perhaps to dress microscopic run out error on tools in place at specific speeds, to compensate dynamically for dynamic tooling runout.
There is an ultra bleeding edge tech for some equipment like Kern mills, such as the Kern Pyramid Nano, using tech beyond ballscrews for motion control called hydrostatic ways. Its basically an incompressable fluid filled bellows that controls machine movement with infinite step resolution, and near perfect smoothness of motion, kind of like controlling a milling machine with precision high speed ultra high accuracy microfluidic motion.
Machines with that technology can make near perfect surfaces with very specialized types of micro milling cutters.
You are correct about the surface finish of an electrode for an EDM being copied onto what it creates- the electrodes are machined by CNC mills- so there are still microscopic cutter shadows and lines on the electrodes. I just did some artificial titanium bone forging dies today, and the pattern of the electrode faces leaves a shadow on the finished part that you can only see when stoned dead flat after burning them to size, but I hand lap some of this away when needed on a granite plate…
Mind you, this is sub 0.0002" or 0.0001" shadow lines. Grinding or lapping corrects this, or hand polishing the electrodes to remove cutter lines, which I do do. Black arts, all of it, can’t tell you how its done any further.
EDMs are used for polishing too! You can get surface finishes near perfect if you use the right electrode material, and prep them correctly. Many parts for critical industries are electropolish finished on EDMs if my research is correct.
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Roger that- done that once. Blew my mind when I burned a hole, then used orbiting to copy burn geometrically perfect screw threads into hardened keyless toolmakers vices impossible to cut with taps, with a single point threaded pc of basically pencil lead I cut on a manual lathe.
I kept looking at everything around me thinking I could put threads in anything, ANYTHING. I immediately wanted my own EDM after that
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Hmm, laptops these days look a lot like a rectangle of solid metal. Print a gun into one and you have TSA’s worst nightmare.
This is super rad to hear about! Those tolerances are insane… It sounds like you work on stuff too cool go be allowed to discuss publicly, but can you at least tell us what industry? Mad curious, but no worries if you can’t. The only thing I can imagine needing this precision is waveguides, though I’m sure I’m missing many use cases
Titanium forging shop for medical and aerospace only.
Yeah I’ve given away some juicy details but I can’t give away any more than that. That should be everything that isn’t proprietary that I cannot share, and stuff that any die shop would tell you, and stuff you can gather from my company’s website if you know what you are looking at. Can’t share anything more, I like my job and wish to keep it.
It’s a really rewarding job an extremely difficult but very fun when it goes well.
It’s probably the only place that has a watchmaker (me) running EDMs. I still do watchmaking on my own, just for me, but blacksmithing too. We use custom made forging tongs made by a local blacksmith who won an ep of Forged In Fire too, and his tongs are really creative. He did things I can’t discuss with them, like adding machined parts to sections of them for certain things.
Its a world class shop, the most high end everything. Really happy I finally found a place in my city that can use someone with my rarer skills.
It’s also really nice to see other happy mutants here who do things even above me like NixieBunny
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High tech Hellraiser lament configuration ftw.
Actually I think you copied my mind. I have a collection of Japanese puzzle boxes made of wood and I have always wanted to make some more complicated ones out of solid tool steel. I think I’m going to buy a CNC mill later this year to do just that because manual just takes too long and I can program whatever I want much quicker
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I wonder, if this is an “Illusionist magic” You see the polished surfaces, how they glide into, and at the end the seamless outside. But you can easily achieve this classical. Okay…, you need some precision… but I guess 1/10 mm would be enough, which is easily done. (Or let it be 1/100mm) Then you have to polish this thing carefully. In such gaps the air nearly flow as a liquid. And mostly this is achieved by some cavity which collapsed and the stream of air works as a lubricant.
At the end you have to make the seamless surface: Put the thing together. hammer on the surface, till the small gaps closed, and grind it - ready.
You can also achieve the APPEARECE of perfection by sanding, hammering and grinding, and using airflow as lubrication on a normally produced metal-piece.
Not magic, but illusion.
