Okay, I’m officially drooling right now at the mere thought.
I was just playing with some more puzzle boxes today and some of them only open if you hold them in the right orientation to gravity because there are gravity pins inside them.
Some of the ones I opened in Japan only opened if you hold them in magnetic north orientation. They are more complex.
I will make these at some point in metal, maybe Ill start an etsy store. They’ll be difficult to open even for puzzlebox aficionados.
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Yes please!
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I recall the job we took most often that required the highest precision were rebuilding hydraulic valves for heavy equipment. Such valves are surprisingly complex as the grooves are cut to mix several circuits together, they were extremely expensive, and many times are not even available. So it was usually worth it to repair them.
At high pressure ordinary seals can’t hold back much hydraulic fluid, so the valve spool (the moving rod in the middle of the valve that has the grooves on it) has to fit the hole in the body to within 0.0002” or less. When a customer’s valves wore out, we’d hone out the cylinder in the valve body until it was free of scoring and truly round. Then we’d grind down the spool until it was clean, and a bit more for clearance. Then we’d send it out for plating. It’d come back with a thick layer of new metal, and we’d grind it down to the new dimensions of the cylinder in the valve body.
40 years ago, it was a not-inexpensive fix. Today, I have no idea how much that might cost. However, today’s equipment may not need it if it’s not mechanically mixed. These days it might be a set of cheap individual valves mixed by computers, in which case replacing simple individual valves might be really cheap.
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Great explanation of something I knew very little about. It never occurred to me that high pressure systems would rely on close tolerances to seal a valve in that way.
Rob- I took a look, please update video tagline? I stand corrected I think.
This does indeed appear to be a new level of die milling on a hyperaccurate form of CNC. These specific parts appear to not be EDM- rather, a special, very advanced form of die milling.
In layman’s terms- these parts look to be made by a CNC mill of capabilities far beyond even normal exotic mills.
They are using similar tooling and tool holders to what I see during the day. Shrink fit induction heated toolholders and special die mills. These CNC apparently have forms of error compensation beyond anything I have seen before, and I occasionally run swiss made die mills in addition to the EDMs.
Some of these parts like the little helix that slowly slides into the block would often be mistaken for EDM parts, but I think they were 5 axis ball milled.
Basically I think it would be more correct without having a definitive answer if this is a video of mixed technologies or one, to just rename it to (seamless machining) if you had to call it something. My apologies to Spf10 for not catching sooner.
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