Turning on Aaron BenDaniel's Blog

Senior Week 32

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I finally made some real progress on the eccentric staircase! Unfortunately, the disks are larger than I would have liked, but it can’t be helped.

I started turning my second attempt in brass, and although brass is easier to machine and the part was smaller, the parting blade was still visibly bending and I felt that it would break sooner or later.

I ended up switching to the carbide insert parting blade. This tool is significantly more rigid and experienced zero bend when I used it. Unfortunately, it is quite a bit shorter than the HSS parting blade and because of this, I needed to bring in the stock and make my eccentric staircase less eccentric. This resulted in larger disks, which I’m not too thrilled with, but I don’t see any other way to make this part, so I guess I’ll need to live with it.

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Even half-finished, I still think it looks pretty cool. I think that even if the part doesn’t come out how I’d initially planned, it’ll still be an overall success.

I also helped clean a little and started taking apart some old sumo-bots. I don’t think any of the juniors or seniors are particularly attached to their sumo-bots, so Mr. Christy tasked me with disassembling them and salvaging the parts.

Senior Week 31

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I started a new project. I want to continue manufacturing projects, and I decided to make a desk ornament/trinket that I’d seen before.

It’s pretty simple to make, at least in theory. The trick is to put the part into the chuck offset from the center of rotation and reclamp the part at different angles to create the spiral of disks.

I’m using a Youtube video as a reference for how to make this part, and their’s came out really good.

I created a drawing and started turning the part on Tuesday.

At first I started with a part that was made out of aluminum and was 1.8 inches in diameter. Unfortunately, I believe that this is simply too large and I ended up breaking a parting blade attempting to turn this part. I very nearly broke another making a second attempt, so I decided to give up on this version.

I decided to redesign the part to be smaller and made out of brass. Brass looks better and is what is used in the video, so maybe it will be easier. The main thing I’m hoping will help is the reduced size. My second version will be both shorter and thinner.

Senior Week 30

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent quite a bit of time this week prepping for the MATE ROV 2025 New England Regional.

As always, there was quite a bit of important stuff that we got done last-minute, our marketing display included! We got it printed (in one day :O) on Tuesday, which was also the day we finished all the writing for it.

We applied the giant sticker on Wednesday and it came out…. fine. There are a few wrinkles, but I’m sure they’ll go unnoticed by everyone but those who applied the sticker.

We get point for having “additional marketing materials” along with our marketing display, so on Thursday I laser-cut some little keychains. They’re not the highest quality, but they’ll definitely be enough for the judges.

I finished the second-to-last part for the Band Saw Fence. This was the first of the difficult parts that require both turning and milling to make. The shank came out pretty good, although the hole on the top could have the threads go a little deeper. Unfortunately, I’d need to drill it deeper in order to do that, and I wouldn’t be confident in the strength of the part if the hole went deeper.

I started the handle and finished the turning portion as well. I discovered that the chamfer tool for the lathe is not 45 degrees on both sides, although I feel like the right side is the one with the real 45 degree angle, which doesn’t make sense. The chamfers are uneven, but I don’t know if anyone would notice without specifically studying them. I’m not too sure why they’re uneven like they are, I’d think it’d be the other way around.

The last features I need to cut on the handle will need the mill, and I’ll use the collet block in order to hold the part.

Senior Week 29

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent this week mostly working on Sunk Robotics’ Technical Documentation and other related documents in preparation for the upcoming MATE ROV New England Regional. Last year, Zack Bertocchi used Adobe InDesign to create our Tech Doc, but he didn’t save the design files, and none of know how to use that software. Because of this, we needed to recreate our Tech Doc from scratch and we opted to use Google Docs to do this.

I was rather skeptical at first, not believing that Google Docs was powerful enough to make something that looked good, but I was pleasantly surprised. Buried deep within submenus and internet searches, Google Docs actually has a reasonably fleshed out formatting system that has the ability to make something pretty good looking.

As part of my efforts this year to prepare the younger members of the team for Ben and my’s imminent departure (and a case of Senioritis), I’ve had them do most of the writing for this year’s doc. I’ve looked over most of it, and while I probably would have written it differently, I think it’ll be fine.

In addition to the Tech Doc, there are a number of other documents that we are required to submit prior to the competition. One of these is the Company Spec Sheet, which I was tasked with creating. I mostly followed the design of last year, but once again had to completely remake it from scratch, this time in Google Sheets.

We still need to take a Team Photo as we completely forgot that’s a thing we need, so we’ll need to take that tomorrow.

I only got a little bit of work done on the Band Saw Fence this week. I began the turning process for the Shank, although I didn’t get too far.

Senior Week 20

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my break from working on the Micromouse, I’ve decided to take up yet another lathe project.

I’ve decided to make a bearing to go inbetween the nut and tool post for our South Bend lathe (I might make another for the Trak, maybe). When aligning the tool post on the lathe, it is quite frustrating when my attempts to tighten the nut also rotate the tool post, forcing me to restart the alignment process. This bearing should hopefully allow the nut to rotate without also rotating the tool post, and should make the process of aligning the tool post much easier.

The first part of this project is a simple spacer, which was rather quick to turn. The important part is the tolerances, which I hit using a boring bar.

Because of how narrow the spacer is, I wasn’t able to securely remount it in a chuck. Fortunately, the finish from the parting blade isn’t too bad, and will work fine when facing down.

The second part of this small project is the holder for the bearing, which I will order from McMasterCarr. The notable thing about this part is that it has an interior pocket, as seen from the scribe lines on the part. What’s called a trepanning tool is needed in order to make cuts like this, but we didn’t have one.

While we probably could have bought a trepanning tool, it would have been a bit expensive, especially for a single project. However, one of the great things about lathes is that it is relatively easy to grind custom tools. As such, we instead bought some tool-blanks and I got try to grinding my own trepanning tool. I haven’t tested it yet, but it look right and I’m hopefully it will work.

Senior Week 19

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I spent turning the parts of my Tap Follower.

On Monday I finished up threading the holder, which ironically, was the perfect situation for a tap follower.

Once the holder was done, I turned the head, which was interesting because it features a taper that I had to cut with the lathe’s compound.

The head was a pretty simply part and I finished it quite quickly. With the head done, all the main parts of the Tap Follower were complete and I could assemble it.

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Along the way, I discovered the most delightful behavior, when pulling a 0.413 inch gauge pin out from the body, it creates a good-enough seal to pull a vacuum and go *pop* when it’s released.

The final part for the Tap Follower is the spring. I had originally intended to wind my own spring, as I had been told that it wasn’t too hard. However, after a couple attempts, I didn’t really get anywhere and gave up. I will be buying a professionally made spring instead.

Despite my failures with winding my own springs, the second one I made worked… sort of. Ben got to try the tap follower out for a single thread before the spring was deformed too much and was rendered unusable. I think the springs I’m making are plastically deforming far too easily, and with springs I buy, I will be able to actually shop around for springs with suitable minimum lengths.

On Thursday, I didn’t have much to do because I needed to wait for my springs to be ordered, so I reorganized all of our resin printing stuff (while storing all the new stuff that arrived). The area underneath the resin printers is much cleaner now. I also spent quite a bit of time helping Tim thread some steel rods, and curiously, we were unable to. The die simply wouldn’t catch and I nor Mr. L could figure out why. I will probably assist Tim with cutting the threads on the lathe.

I also decided to start work on a hopefully short project from Mr. L to make some covers for the South Bend lathe’s ways. We’re going to buy some fabric bellows covers and I need to design a way to mount them on the lathe.

Senior Week 18

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I got quite a bit of work done, but at the same time it feels like I didn’t do as much as I’d have liked. On my goal sheet, I was rather optimistic about my timeline for this project and thought I’d be able to have it completed by Friday. Suffice it to say, this will not happen. Even if I didn’t end up needing to remake the holder, there was no way I’d have been able to get everything done.

Before I write about this week’s work, I finally got a picture of the finished plaque I’d made last week. This is the plaque that will be mounted by Construction somewhere at the MMS.

Tuesday

On Tuesday I turned the threads on the body of my Tap Follower. They were not fantastic. I didn’t make a trough for me to stop threading as I was concerned about the wall thickness. Because of this, the ends of the threads are inconsistent and overall not great. However, I expect that they will still work just fine and that it’s purely cosmetic.

In addition to the threads on Tuesday, I also drilled the 1/2in hole in the body. It took quite a while, as I needed to do a “pecking” operation to avoid clogging up the drill bit with chips. This significantly slows down the process and it ended up taking me almost a whole day. I also ended up misjudging the depth of the drilling operation and ended up needing to do multiple operations because, after I finished the first one, I realized that it wasn’t deep enough and there was more material inside of the piece than I had predicted.

On the bright side, this showed firsthand one of the big advantages of using a collet chuck. Even though I took the piece out and put it back in, it was still perfectly concentric. Additionally, though it’s important to note I’m working with steel and not aluminum, there were no marks on the parts from the chuck and the surface finish was unblemished.

By the end of Tuesday, I finished the body. I think it turned out about as good as I could have expected, though it’s definitely smaller than I imagined when I was designing it in Fusion. I’m a bit concerned that it’ll be too small, but for smaller threads, which is most of what we’re making, I hope it will be enough.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I got to work on the holder, which is the part of the Tap Follower that compresses the spring and provides a method to hold the tool. The primary feature of the holder is a 3/4in circular extrusion intended to be held by a Tormach ER32 collet. Tormach collets can be held by our Tormach mills and our Trak with an adapter we have. However, we won’t be able to hold the Tap Follower in a lathe tailstock as we do not have a Tormach to Morse Taper adapter.

Luckily, I plan to make one. It won’t clamp down on the Tormach collets, so they’ll just pull out and will freely rotate, but for tools that are pushed into the taper and are fine rotating (like my Tap Follower), this adapter I plan to make will enable me to mount my Tap Follower in all of our mills and lathes.

Because the maximum outer diameter of the holder is 1.125in (changed from the drawing I made), I need stock greater than one inch in diameter. The next largest steel stock we have is 1.3in, which is too big to fit in the collet chuck. Luckily, it’s quite easy to swap between the two chucks and I learned how to do so.

Unfortunately, in the process of parting off the holder, and I’m not quite sure what happened, I was probably just going to fast or not using enough oil, there was a THUNK, which is never a good sound to hear when turning.

I immediately stopped the parting operation and inspected the part and tool. The part was fine, but the parting blade was mangled. Interestingly, the blade looked mangled UP. Which is quite weird, as the material was moving down the blade. I’m not really sure how that could have happened. I unfortunately did not take a picture of the blade before I fixed it. However, the photo above shows what it is now, after I re-ground the tip.

After my parting blade mishap, I wanted to try grinding the blade back into a suitable shape, as that is the primary advantage of solid tools like the parting blade I was using. Because I follow shop safety rules, I did not use my cellphone while grinding it, but I did take a photo of the scene after the fact and used high-tech digital photo tools to faithfully recreate the scene in HD™ detail.

After I parted my piece, I could finally drill and thread it. The drilling went pretty smoothly and I drilled out a 3/4in hole, perfect for my 3/4-10 threads! :)

Unfortunately, as I attempted to cut the threads, I noticed a peculiar problem: the tap refused the catch. After some heavy introspection and soul-searching, I determined the cause of the problem. It appeared that, despite the major diameter of 3/4 inch threads being 3/4 inch, the minor diameter needed to be less-than 3/4 inch. Huh, who’da thunk?

Your browser does not support the video tag. NOTE: THIS VIDEO WAS TAKEN BY MR. L, NOT ME.

This mistake forced me to scrap the part and start over from the beginning. The second time around went quicker, but while the turning itself might have been quicker, things still took a lot longer than expected…

As I was swapping the chucks, I did everything as-per-usual: loosen all the bolts holding the collet-chuck in, remove the collet-chuck, clean the mating faces on the lathe and three-jaw-chuck, slot the three-jaw-chuck in, and tighten the bolts. This procedure had worked for me before and I thought it was sufficient. It was not. There are some lines on the lathe and the chuck that apparently need to line up, to the surprise of both me and Mr. L.

My part didn’t look very concentric, even after just facing it, and it started going THUNK at the end of every pass after a while. I was highly concerned, especially after I thought I saw the part jumping up and down once or twice. Despite consulting the manual our lathe came with and not seeing anything about the lines, I figured I would try re-mounting the three-jaw-chuck and aligning them in hopes it would solve my concerning part-holding situation. This appeared to have fixed the issue and after the re-mount, my part was finally concentric after facing and it stopped making bad noises.

On Wednesday, Tanzy, Ben, and I moved one of the stock-holders, which opened up a gap between the small Tormach and router for us to walk through. This was sorely needed, as in order to get to the drawers on the other side of the machine shop, you’d need to walk all around the machines to get there. Now you can walk directly through this gap to get there.

Thursday

By Thursday, it was time to start drilling the hole to be tapped. This time, I would remember to NOT drill to 3/4in and instead go slightly under, to a value specified on our tapping chart (I don’t remember the exact number). Unfortunately, I spent the entire day drilling the hole and I’m not even done, as we don’t have the drill bit we need and will need to use a boring bar. In order to use a boring bar, though, we do still need to pre-drill a smaller hole.

This step took a long time. Apparently, all three of our 1/2 inch drill bits are frightfully dull and can barely drill even aluminum. Mr. L and I tried to sharpen them, but we ultimately failed. Neither of us is quite sure what’s wrong, and YouTube videos demonstrating our model of drill bit sharpener do not reveal any problems in our method. I ended up using a 1/2 inch drill bit from Mr. L’s secret stash to drill my hole, which finally worked and cut without problem.

Senior Week 17

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m taking a break from my Micromouse project because I’d been getting quite frusrated with my lack of progress and am instead doing some manufacturing, which is a much-needed change of pace.

On Monday I did a little Micromouse work (but as usual, ultimately accomplished nothing) before commiting to my manufacturing side project(s).

On Tuesday I made a part for Mr. L on the lathe.

On Wednesday I started planning my new project: A tap-follower. A tap-follower is a tool used make the process of using a tapping tool easier by applying pressue and keeping it centered. Making sure threads are straight and centered is vitally important, and it can be quite a challenge to do by hand. A tap-follower is used in a mill or lathe to help make sure the tap is aligned properly and applies some pressue to help get it started in the material.

I created the drawings for it on Wednesday. The tool will have four parts in total, including the spring.

On Thursday I started turning the body of the tap-follower. It will require two setups and hopefully the shop’s new collet-chuck will help keep my parts concentric between setups.

Junior Week 21

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This has been a very lathe-filled week.

My Machinist’s Jack is complete. It’s….. mostly flat, although it a bit wiggly when fully extended. I might make another so the shop has a set later, but that’s not something I’m going to do soon, I’m done with the lathe for the time being.

Wednesday after school, JONA has its first swim since I redid the ESC PCBs. Although our dumpster is rather small, the test was very promising and I’m very excited for when we can put it in the MHS pool next week. Other than some weights, which I’ll make sometime before 2/7, and a manipulator system (TBD), JONA is done!

Some other small things I did this week include making two pieces for a project of Mr. L’s with the lathe, and helping him (more like hovering over his shoulder while he follows my guide) with the water jet cutter.

Junior Week 20

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spent most of this week working on my Machinist’s Jack project. I spent the first two days attempting to turn the head of the jack, and I almost completed it. However, the threads I made had too high a diameter because I made the assumption that 1/2-13 screws are actually 1/2in wide. This is not the case. I attempted to save what I had made but ultimately had to scrap it. It did serve as a refresher on how to use a lathe, though, as I had very little previous experience using them before.

Wednesday after school I and a number of other team members wrapped our tether. Although I’m still not sure how we’re going to add flotation to it, at the moment I think the tether is in a very good place right now. I also added strain relief to the tether on the ROV’s side. I intend to use the same system on the surface, but need to find one more part before I can finish that.

Wednesday and Thursday I made the base of my Machinist’s Jack. It’s not quite done, with just a little but of facing left to remove the excess material on one side, but other than that this part is done.

Junior Week 19

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week has marked the end of my major contributions to the robotics team. Although I will of course continue to help, my two main projects are now complete.

On Wednesday, Mr. Christy’s friend Shane helped fix the voltage drop that was causing instability in JONA ROV’s 5V systems. With that fixed, JONA ROV is now fully functional and can begin pool testing.

I tested my water jet guide with the help of juniors Tanzerul Azam and William Tseng. My water jet guide is now complete. It is available here.

With all of the projects I’d been devoting most of my time to complete, I now have almost nothing to do in the shop. This means that I can start a new project, or more specifically, re-start an old one. At the very end of my Sophomore year, I began designing and manufacturing some machinists jacks. My first attempt did not end well, but I believe that, with the knowledge I gained from my first attempt, I can successfully manufacture them this time. I just started to turn the first one on Thursday, and I predict this project will take at minimum all of next week.