Have you always been such a loose Cannon?!

MBI love nothing more than things that shoot things, so heres some details of another of our projectile launching projects.

This was a confetti firing cannon, that was designed to be used in conjunction with a mechanical organ, that the cannon might fire in time with the music! We never got round to actually trying it with an organ as, well to be honest the thing was overly bulky took up too much space and hence was chopped up and made into a planter for cactus's eventually. Still it was fun, and the simple mechanism did fire confetti quite nicely as Can be seen below! 

The main body was laminated ply, stained and varnished with turned solid ply wheels. The barrel itself was constructed of laminated paper around a wooden framework, painted in Hammerite Hammered Finish Gloss Black, for that authentic cast iron patina! 

Side profile...

Main air supply into barrel shown above...

Firing Shots...

Detail of the barrel end mouldings...

The Carpenter.

Hello, is it Mead you're looking for?

Ayup Chief, ... some updates of the brewing mead...

More frequent Bubbling! 1 bubble of released gas at 6-7 second intervals! Its alive!!!
Started to clear, ... sediment settling at bottom of demijohn,
The raisins have started floating?!, maybe they're trying to leave?

approx. 5 weeks in?!.

Shown above, the rudimentary cardboard light shield, made from a banjo box, to block the detrimental damage direct sunlight will have on fermentation! 

The Carpenter

Steam Powered Christmas Tree

Thought this would make a good post for Christmas day! A few years ago, a few days before Christmas, I had the brilliant idea of producing a steam powered Christmas tree. The idea stemmed back from an article in Model Engineer I had read many years back now. I already had in my possession a Stuart #500 boiler with a Basset Lowke 'Eclipse' engine mounted together on a base, so with some scrap wood, a Meccano motor, some LEDs and one of those miniature trees probably brought from a car-boot sale at some stage over the years, this was knocked up. It looks very crude, mainly because it is, but it was a project just because I could!

Merry Christmas from us both here at Manbench Industries!

The Engineer.

Google Sketchup Models Part I

The free Google Sketchup is a fantastic program - not suitable for accurate drawings, but for a visual representation of a project, very handy. We have already shown you some of our Sketchup models made for various projects and will continue to do so, however you may be interested in seeing some of our models we have worked on just for fun and practice of various features in the program.

I shall start this with a few screen grabs of the model of my Myford Super 7 lathe that I started a while back. I might get around to finishing it one day!

The Engineer.

Lessons learned in Drum Making P1

Heres a collection of photo's from the production of the custom built drum kit, pictures speak a thousand words so I'll just post them here! A great variety of skills (learned and practiced) used in making this including sign writing, lamination, machining, fabricating and many more, a great all round project and one I'd recommend anyone who's looking for something interesting to make!

More detailed shots of components to follow! 

The Carpenter

Wilesco D32 Rebuild

Now that I am back from university for a few weeks, I have some workshop time finally! I thought I'd make a start on the rebuild of a Wilesco D32 (two of them in fact!) Why two? I'd always wanted one of these in my collection but with a decent example going at around £600 a piece, I just couldn't afford one! In the end, I picked up two knackered ones for under £100 each with the intention of making one out of the two. In the end, I found the missing parts to complete the pair on German eBay at reasonable prices, so at some stage in the future I will restore the both. I only have photos of one of them as purchased, but they were both in pretty much the same condition.

The Engineer.

Steam Generating Plant

This project, from about three or four years ago now is one I am very pleased with. It started life as a standard Wilesco D20 steam engine that I bought many many years ago from PPS Steam Models (now sadly defunct) and provided me many years of enjoyment. I decided to do something with it and after experimenting with a few Meccano motors I came up with a nice design for a generator. I came up with further ideas which were added to the design as I went along: a boiler feed pump to keep the water topped up, a control panel, and a water tank among other things. The project is still not finished - I have a few ideas for further improvements such as the fitting of a gas burner to make the increased running times allowed by the boiler feed pump to be more enjoyable.

The Engineer.

Unusual Methods Of Clamping IV

Ok, so technically this is a photo from work, but its too great an example of clamping (a topic we love here at MBI) to pass up....

Sometimes when things are a real awkward shape, in this case a complex hollow taper, you just need millions and millions of clamps to keep the things from flopping about all over the place.
Hence why every workshop should have as many clamps as possible, as you never know when you're going to need them all!

TIP_OF_THE_DAY-  Buy a few whenever you see them for sale, i'll guarantee they'll save your ass at some point!

The Carpenter...

Compressed Air Powered Snow Gun

Miniature armaments are something that will probably crop up quite a lot here - after all, what's more fun than a gun! The one shown here was built in two days for the schools Christmas performance. We were asked to produce something to fire fake snow at the audience at the end of the show. It wasn't going to be seen - but that doesn't mean we have to do a half-assed job of the design. The idea that something needs to like nice even if not seen is something we at MBI strongly feel has been lost in the last one hundred years.

Anyway, the gun consists of a bit of plastic tube, a ball valve some hardboard and some bits found in the bottom of the school scrap bin! A plunger was also made to load the snow into the barrel but the school Physics department now use this with their potato cannons!

The Engineer.

Generator Experiment

A school project now - this was built for my A-Level Physics experiment where I decided to build a dynamo and measure the effects of increasing magnetic field strength, number of coils and velocity of rotation upon the voltage created. The dynamo was quite crude and very inefficient - the windings I made had wooden, as opposed to iron cores - the cast iron I had to do the job was so hard it barely scratched by the big power hacksaw I tried to cut it with - I suspect it was chilled. The AC voltage coming from the dynamo was measured on a oscilloscope,; the wave created is shown below. Anyway, I powered the generator by a big 12V motor with a field coil needing two power packs to run it. With the two power packs running, I was taking 460V from the mains, with the dynamo itself producing somewhere in the region of 0.4V, equating to an efficiency of somewhere around 0.08% - how's that for solving the energy crisis!

The Engineer.