The Mid-Atlantic Battle Group will have a table at this year's Maker Faire in North Carolina. The MABG will have a couple of boats on hand for people to look at as well as a live fire demonstration showing how Big Guns R/C warship cannons operate.
This evening I made the breeches for Nassau's cannons. The breech is where rounds are fed from the magazine into the bottom of the cannon's barrels. This blog post will walk you through most of the process for making a breech on a mini-mill and mini-lathe. These steps have been simplified from what someone might do who wanted everything as precise as possible. I am more interested in making parts quickly - this means minimizing setup and maximizing the number of parts that can be made each time a measurement is taken.
This morning I did all the mill work for Nassau's cannon manifolds. The manifold is basically the bottom of the part of the cannon that rotates. It has two purposes (a) it redirects the CO2 to the barrels and (b) provides a way to adjust how the shot sits in the breach. This blog post will walk you through most of the process for making a manifold on a mini-mill and mini-lathe. These steps have been simplified from what someone might do who wanted everything as precise as possible. I am more interested in making parts quickly - this means minimizing setup and maximizing the number of parts that can be made each time a measurement is taken.
I figure I should let folks know what I've been up to, and how far I've gotten on the Oiler conversion to CAD plans. I started with the line drawings, and plotted the provided hull contours. Placing them into a 3-d space according to the 2-d plans, I was able to generate a full hull form (a mesh, for those who know 3d modeling and CAD). From that, I am going to generate actual ribs.
This blog post briefly describes how to cut windows in a previously marked fiberglass hull. Cutting windows in a fiberglass hull, even a thick one like my Nassau hull, is far easier than making a wood hull from scratch. This is the first part of a series of articles I will write while building my German Dreadnaught Nassau.
This evening I made the breeches for Nassau's cannons. The breech is where rounds are fed from the magazine into the bottom of the cannon's barrels. This blog post will walk you through most of the process for making a breech on a mini-mill and mini-lathe. These steps have been simplified from what someone might do who wanted everything as precise as possible. I am more interested in making parts quickly - this means minimizing setup and maximizing the number of parts that can be made each time a measurement is taken.
This morning I did all the mill work for Nassau's cannon manifolds. The manifold is basically the bottom of the part of the cannon that rotates. It has two purposes (a) it redirects the CO2 to the barrels and (b) provides a way to adjust how the shot sits in the breach. This blog post will walk you through most of the process for making a manifold on a mini-mill and mini-lathe. These steps have been simplified from what someone might do who wanted everything as precise as possible. I am more interested in making parts quickly - this means minimizing setup and maximizing the number of parts that can be made each time a measurement is taken.
I figure I should let folks know what I've been up to, and how far I've gotten on the Oiler conversion to CAD plans. I started with the line drawings, and plotted the provided hull contours. Placing them into a 3-d space according to the 2-d plans, I was able to generate a full hull form (a mesh, for those who know 3d modeling and CAD). From that, I am going to generate actual ribs.
This blog post briefly describes how to cut windows in a previously marked fiberglass hull. Cutting windows in a fiberglass hull, even a thick one like my Nassau hull, is far easier than making a wood hull from scratch. This is the first part of a series of articles I will write while building my German Dreadnaught Nassau.