I was surprised to find that, as I started, I couldn’t even view the website because the hosting company had updated some software without updating all the requisites so the site didn’t even work!  Sigh…

In any case, if you’ve been one of the ones who have been checking in, I apologize for letting this languish and will try to do better in the future!!!

It took some creative rearrangement of other items in the workshop, but, having had a few years in the shop, I was able to determine what’s needed all the time and what can be tucked away and pulled out only when needed.  Consequently, here is my new ‘corner machine shop’!

Complete machine shop in a corner.

I’ll now be able to work on metal!  Not just cutting on the plasma cutter or bandsaw, but actually milling, drilling, and turning accurately!

Here is the replica, mounted on our Garden Shed:

New decoration for our garden shed.

And a closer view:

Here’s a closer view of the branch and ButterFly

And finally the Butterfly:

Closeup of Butterfly

Details of how this was made are down below.

The other recent addition to the Yard is some livestock to entertain our Granddaughter when she comes to visit.

Here is the Sheep looking longingly at the front lawn…

Closeup of the Sheep:

Sheep painted.

The two large pieces, the Sheep and, especially, the Stylized Branch, both required some special cutting techniques because both of them were too large to fit on the CNC Plasma Table.  The table can only cut  23″ in one direction and 25″ in the other.  The good news is that the table is open on the ends of the 23″ axis so, theoretically ^{(see Note [1] below)}, I could cut something as long as will fit in my Workshop.

However, this required multiple steps in both processing the artwork and the cutting process. Each step allowed me to cut a region of the metal, the cutting was paused while I re-positioned and aligned the steel for the next cut, and then cutting was resumed at the next section with the software offsetting the coordinates to match the new position.  The alignment is critical as the cut line is only about 0.050″ wide so any error in positioning would, at best, leave a jog in the cut line, or, worse, an uncut section of steel that would need manual cutting and fixing.

The sheep was used to test and prove the process.  It could have been done by limiting the size to 23″, but using a full sheet gave me a bigger sheep and tested the process.

The first step was to rework the art work:

Maximized Sheep Artwork, rotated and scaled to fit 24×24 piece of steel.

You can see the split line between the two halves of the drawing.  That’s where the art work needed to be separated into to independent groups.  Note that the art work has internal cuts and they had to be separated into the two different cut phases as well.

Using the Sheep project to refine the process turned out to be a wise decision as I learned enough from the Sheep project to do the Stylized branch, which required three sections over a 72 piece of steel, and 4 joints.

Branch Artwork showing three sections and mounting hole locations.

Cutting a 6 foot long piece of steel also required some re-arrangement of my workshop, not only to make room for the workpiece but also to provide support for the portions of steel that were on either side of the table during the cut.   It also concerned me that my Plasma cutter, which is normally kept in a little alcove surrounded by fiberglass welding blankets where most of the sparks are contained by the blankets, would now be out in the open during all the cuts with sparks flying in all directions!  As a precaution I put my fire extinguisher right at my side during the whole operation!

Here is the setup prior to cut:

I had to rearrange my workshop to manage a 6 foot long piece of steel!

And here is the result after the cut:

And here is the finished cut. Notice the lead in and lead out cuts at the joint of each section.

And the final piece cleaned up and ready to paint.

Branch ready for painting!

All in all, the cutting went very well with probably no more than 1/32″ misalignment in the worst case.  As a result of this project, I’m confident that I can reliably do larger pieces still!

I shopped around and found a good deal on a Dewalt 60 gallon, 3.7HP, 11.5 SCFM compressor, on sale locally at a Tractor Supply store.  Less than 8 miles away!  I could pick it up and not pay any shipping charges!  Yippee!

So, I drove over there and found they had just one left, and it was missing it’s intake air filter.  Hmmmm, I checked it out and thought I could build a temporary filter while the store ordered a replacement (right at the beginning of the Covid pandemic!).  We loaded it on my truck with a fork lift and I brought it home.

So, here it is, ready to unload.

Arrival of new compressor. Fortunately, it’s not going far from this spot!

After a bit of reorganization of my shop (like moving my 300lb dust collector and installing a ton of air filtering/water separators/valves/etc), I successfully unloaded and installed it.

I then made the parts for the air filter…

Homemade parts for temporary air filter.

Assembled parts for temporary air filter.

‘Temporary’ Air Filter

Note that the ‘temporary’ filter is still installed.  Tractor Supply seems to have forgotten that they owed me one.  Good thing the ‘temporary’ one is good enough!

My friend suggested that a silhouette of Druid Arch, a difficult to find, but very imposing natural arch, would be appropriate. Fortunately I had a fairly nice and high contrast photo of the arch that I took on a trip in 2005. So…
Here’s the arch:

Druid Arch

and here is the gift:

Gift to retiring Canyonlands Park Superintendent, Kate Cannon.

So, a popular item in plasma cutting ‘circles’ is what’s called an ‘F-Bomb’. Now without going into the derivation of this name, the object is a cutout that looks like a ‘bomb’ that would be dropped from an airplane with a large ‘F’ cut out of the center (for some reason I’m not at liberty to say). For this occasion, however, we can be sure that the ‘F’ stands for ‘Fifty’ and therefore, the following object seems entirely appropriate:

‘F-Bomb’ birthday gift for Duff.

Happy Birthday, Duff!

For those who are curious, the ‘bomb’ was cut out of a sheet of 11gauge 304 Stainless Steel and I used my Laser engraver to ‘burn’ the printing onto the surface.

Before and After new cabinets for East Wall of Workshop.

Naturally, an empty space like the area on the left can not go un-filled! So…
Thinking about what’s next on the workshop growth plan, I was ready to start dabbling into metal work. Lots of choices here, but, in the end, I concluded that the first place to start was the ability to cut sheets of metal into something useful. After some investigation, I discovered that a company in California, Langmuir Systems, sold a CNC Plasma Cutter kit for a reasonable price.

CrossFire CNC Plasma cutter (sold as a kit).

CNC Plasma Cutter ready to go!

Close up of CNC Plasma setup.

So, now that my new toy, er, tool is in place, here’s the first ‘real’ thing that I cut…

First Pass ‘artwork’ from CNC Plasma Cutter, it works!

Simple Yard Art cleaned up!