It’s the end of October, and other than celebrating ‘Back to the Future’ day with a back-to-back trilogy movie night, we’ve been hard at it bashing metal late into the night. Where we did have time to “build it to scale and paint it…”
If you haven’t seen the films, you’re not going to get a lot of the references in this update… but what you gonna do?
As has become tradition, we have a run-down of the metal parts that are in motion and under the grindstone.
Let’s kick things off with…
The Golden (Steel) Rule
Potato quality pictures for royal quality rulers.
These are brushed laser cut blanks for the steel rules which accompany the workstation. They’ve been on a long journey getting machined before being sent away for finishing using some specialist equipment that can handle long thin flat things, and now they’re here, awaiting the final nail-biting process of laser engraving the divisions on each side! Phew!
Surface Plates
We some of the surface plates finished up, and here they are in fully finished stainless steel! This is really stacking up to be one of the heaviest pallets around.
Quick Release
The clamping jaws for the Quick Release Mounts were in production last month, but now you can see some of the parts have started to have the final finishing applied. Not looking shabby for a part that no one will ever see… let’s not forget our hidden heroes!
Anodised Parts
Anodised parts continue to flow in as our machined aluminium goes out the door a dull silver and comes back pitch black and hard as nails! The latest round are these main parts of the Fractal Vices that the vice jaws attach to. We’ve been picking out some small errors in this post-machining process where, when putting the screws in, some of the anodising is cracking. We’re currently working on this and rectifying these issues to prevent it from occurring on future batches.
Shiny Balls That Make You Say ‘Great Scott!’
The parts everyone has been waiting for have finally had their last operation completed, so now we have fully fledged high shine perfected steel balls on the end of our ball mounts. Not everyone can say that. It’s a big day, and some of the machine operators did ask ‘what are you guys making here?’. We were surprised they’d never seen such shiny balls before.
These are not quite yet finished, but the first few hundred are all looking and performing as they should be.
The Staple Diet Of Our Updates, Fractal Jaws Being Machined
If you’re a regular reader of these updates I’m sure by now this is a familiar sight (it is for us). It is of course the fractals getting machined and undergoing various milling processes. This time we have brass going through their final operation before they’re stacked up ready for delivery.
WE HAVE TR12s!
Embracing the 4th dimension we now have the last operation underway, which is to put the threads on the lead screws that makes the vise do the all-important job of tightening up and holding your bits! We covered the making of these blank parts in some of the previous updates, so if you wanted to look back in time to what they used to look like, then boop here.
Other News
In other news, we’re gearing up for a grand tour of all our suppliers! This is ahead of them moving things around the world to our Yorkshire workshop where the final assembly will take place. We haven’t done a big run like this since our Pocket Driver campaign, and it is something we like to factor in on a campaign of this size. This means we can ensure everything is made to the same standard, all the parts are interchangeable, and most importantly we catch any mistakes or delays as early as possible.
From an outside perspective this probably looks rather dull with us spending days in each place measuring and spot checking 5% of all the parts that have been made, but from our experience this has always paid off in the long run.
Hopefully next month’s update we will have some things to show you from all that traveling around. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
Well, that’s all we have time for this month! Unless we drive back to 30 minutes ago… As always if you have any questions or want to know anything additional, just send us a message or leave a comment and I will be happy to fill in the blanks!
Until next month, remember if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?