Slide-in caravan build part 3

The frame is finished now! It's been a while since my last update because I had some uni commitments (making a CAD model of a Formula SAE racing car if anyone want's to know) but now I can get back to the big build! So, pictured here, are the steps to putting all the frame sections together. 

The first two pieces to go together were the floor and the rear wall.

Then the left side...

Then the right side...

And finally the roof.

Just a little teaser of how it will look being towed by the car. 

I think it looks rather good.

I managed to get some fibre glass insulation for free and just today I got hold of a few internal doors with which to make...  many things.

Slide-in caravan build part 2

The caravan build is going really well. I have finished all the frame sections and it's nearly time to put them all together. It's very easy to underestimate how much timber and how many screws go into a frame like this.

I've moved the project from my shed into my dads big garage to give me enough space to put the sections together.

Even though I don't think they are necessary, I thought I ought to make some fastening points to tie it down to the trailer. I also made some steel strengtheners to help make the frame more rigid in the vulnerable areas.

After the frame is together and completely finished the next stage will be to clad the outside and make it watertight.

This is a much better picture of what it will look like, but I'm not sure whether to do the pop-up thingy or not.

Slide-in caravan build part 1

I'm building a caravan! A bit out of the blue I know, but it's something I've wanted to do for ages and the other day I managed to get hold of a lot of 1x2 timber for free. It's exactly what I needed and with a bit of scavenging around the house and a good internet connection to look on gumtree, I reckon I can make this mini home on wheels for around $100. Now that's what I call ambitious!

If you've been following this blog for a while then you might know that I'm studying engineering at university. So you'll probably be wondering how on earth I have time for this. Well after a lot of careful consideration I have decided to pull out of uni, for a while at least. I've done one semester and didn't do very well in it and I think there were several reasons for that. Although that is just one of many reasons I pulled out. Another reason is that uni is very theoretical and I'm a very practical person so I feel as though uni is wasting that side of me but trying to cultivate other skills that I don't naturally have, like academic ones. I believe this is the right decision. Plus I have loads of time on my hands now! But I do have to decide which path to take instead...

The concept of this particular caravan is rare and unusual but frankly quite simple. It's a little house that fits onto a trailer. It's just like those campers you see in the backs of utes (trucks, for our non-Australian friends), only it's made to fit a trailer rather than a vehicle. It's completely removable and the trailer needs no modification in any way so when it's not in use, you've still got a regular trailer. I really don't know why this isn't done more often.

One of the classes I did at uni involved learning how to use a proper CAD program so seeing as I know a thing or two about that, I thought I'd use it to design the whole caravan. First up, the frame. This is still a work in progress and I'm kind of building it as I design it so one of the walls is almost made and most of the rest of the structure has yet to be even thought about. Still here are the frames for the left and right sides.

They may look over-engineered and frankly they probably are, but what you have to remember is that this has to withstand hurricane force winds for long periods and will be shaken and rattled around like one of those machines that separates little rocks form bigger rocks. So when you think of it like that, it's better to have it over-engineered than done lazily and have it fall apart the first time you take it on the highway.

This is something like what it will look like. The blue thing is obviously the trailer. 

If it looks a bit weird that's because this is an orthographic projection rather than perspective.

After just a couple of days in the workshop the part production is really pushing bow waves.

I seem to be able to make parts far quicker than I can design them.

It's great to be finally able to start a project that I've wanted to do for many years. For some reason I've always had a strange urge to build a caravan. I don't know why and I don't plan to use it that much, I just wanted to make one! Now I'm as happy as a man who thought a cat had done its business on his pie, but it turned out to be an extra big blackberry!

10th scale RC Series 1 80" Land Rover build part 1

For no particular reason at all, a couple of days ago I felt the urge to make a Land Rover out of cardboard. I wanted to make a 10th scale model of a series 1 Land Rover from scratch using cardboard in place of sheet metal and hot glue as weld because, to me, a glue gun is a poor mans welder. And I don't have a welder, although it is on the bucket list.

I wanted this to be a reasonably accurate model, well as accurate as you can get in cardboard, and I also wanted it to be drivable and remote controlled because as we all know, I like a challenge.

At this point you might be asking 'why cardboard?' or 'what happens if you get it wet?'

Anyway, the first thing to make is the chassis. I got some original chassis plans drawn by Land Rover, cut out the relevant shapes, transferred them to cardboard and started cutting away. Where there would be a bend in a part, I'd make a score in the surface of the cardboard along the line which would be bent with a ruler and a not particularly sharp knife. That's not the right way to do it, I just don't have a particularly sharp knife.

I would apologise for the vast lack of photos in this post but I'm not going to because it's not my fault. It's the fault of my new phone which seems to like damaging photos taken with it's camera, rendering them useless. Trust me, I took plenty of photos, probably more than I would for a normal project but sadly they don't exist any more. They probably weren't that interesting anyway.

After all the flat nets of the parts were made it was then a simple and pretty quick matter of glue-gunning them together. It was all quite easy really. The hardest part of the chassis was trying to work out how some of the cross members were attached to the chassis rails. Lining the two chassis rails up before joining them with cross members, while fiddly and time consuming, is important and must be done as accurately as possible because if they're not right, nothing else will be.

A picture of the chassis, taken the old-fashioned way, not with a phone but with a camera!

This is probably one of the most satisfying ambitious projects I've done for a while. Honestly, having a completed chassis sitting in front of me after only two days of work makes me as happy as a Frenchman who's just invented a pair of self-removing trousers.

Planting trees, even model ones, is more tiring than you might think.

Hi guys, I thought I'd give you a bit of an update today. I started uni this year and I've been incredibly busy! So I haven't really had time to work on any ambitious projects lately. However I have done a few little things which I think are worth a post. 

The 3D printer works and has done for a while now. It's running quite well and I think I've nutted out all its little idiosyncrasies. It was a total pain to set up but now that it's running, it's so nice to have. For me it's the perfect system because I prefer designing things to actually making them so being able to design lots of things and have them made for me by a machine is fantastic. 

This is a model Tardis I made (yes with the printer) for my friend who is well into Dr Who. It is actually printed in white plastic and painted blue, although I've since bought some blue plastic to make more Tardises with. This was somewhat rare amongst my projects because I actually finished this one. It's even got a flashing light in it! 

Light off, light on.

Probably my longest term project and one which doesn't get much of a mention is my model train layout. It's a replica of a German layout called Zofeld which was originally in HO scale but I'm making it in N scale which is about half the size. But even though it's half the size, it's still damned expensive and it's impossible to find the right buildings. Whilst they exist in HO scale, the manufacturers don't seem to make the same models in the scale I'm using. So I have to make do with similar ones. However with the printer I can simply make my own buildings. So that's exactly what I've done.

This is the first building made on the printer, I've just finished painting it and I think it's come out quite well. I'm not going to print all my own buildings because the computer models for them are very fiddly and time consuming. I'll only make the ones which I can't find good replacements for. This model isn't quite finished, it still needs windows, lights and weathering but so far it's looking good. Let me know what you think.

I made this a little while ago when I did karting.

Update

I've got to say a big thank you to everyone who donated to our team. In total we raised $523 all to go towards cancer research. The event was a huge success. Out of all the teams, over $237,000 was raised in what was the largest relay for life in Hobart yet.

Next year we'll be back with a bigger goal and a bigger team to try and raise as much as we can.

It was a very sobering experience to meet so many people who had been affected by cancer. Either with cancer themselves or caring for a loved one with cancer. It affects so many people but we can beat it with your help with funds for research.

Now, back to the projects!

I haven't really been doing much lately as I've just started uni which takes up a surprising amount of time. I did get the printer working for a while and printed a few things but when I tried to transport it, some electronics broke and I don't have time to fix it right now. That's something for later.

I have recently got back into flying model planes and I plan to put out a few short videos of that soon. Also I'm thinking of rekindling, if you will, my old YouTube channel with various types of videos. Mostly to do with my projects and inventions but also some science, vlogs, hiphop, interviews and general larking about. So go and subscribe to catch all the action → http://www.youtube.com/user/RCapricot

Donate for cancer research.

Hi guys, I hope you're having an awesome day!

I have recently got involved with a charity called cancer council. I'm part of a team called Duct Tape Almighty in the relay for life. The relay for life is a yearly event that raises money for cancer research by getting teams of people to run around a track for 24 hours. It sounds ghastly but I'm really looking forward to it. 

There is just one problem, we have a goal of raising $2000 before the event and currently we are on $50. The relay starts on the 1st of march so we haven't got long to go. So this is where I need your help. Myself and all my team mates would really appreciate it if you would make a small donation online by becoming a sponsor of our team. It doesn't have to be a big donation, jut one or two dollars will do, because if everyone who reads this blog donates just $1 then we will easily reach our goal. 

To donate, just go to the link, then click on "Donate to this team", put in your details and you're done!

I would like to stress that ALL the money you donate will go into research, none of it goes to our team at all. 

So thanks for donating and I'll get back to you soon!

3D printer problems.

Seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to base a whole system around uploading an arduino sketch to something which isn't an arduino? Really not a happy chappy right now. If you hadn't already worked it out I've recently bought a 3D printer. It's a RepRap Prusa Mendel I2 from GeeeTech and it has a Sanguinololu 1.3a electronics board with an ATMEL ATMEGA1284P processor.

The whole thing has been a bit of a disaster really. When I first bought it off eBay I thought I was getting a really great deal and that I'd be printing in no time. Not so. A week after I paid for it, another similar printer appeared which could print four times more accurately and cost $200 less and when it cost a few hundred, that really makes a difference, so I wasn't too happy about that. The seller I bought it from said that they ship within 48 hours of receiving payment but after a week of waiting I spoke to them and asked what was going on, they grovelled and atoned and after yet another week it was finally on its way. Two more weeks later it arrived and I was beside myself with anticipation.

It came in kit form and I put it together over a weekend using the general plans on the RepRap Wiki. It was only after I finished it that I discovered there were plans for the exact model I had. You see, although it's an open source design and they should all be the same, each manufacturer makes lots of little changes to the ones they produce. What this means is that the general plans are useless, and that there were lots of little mistakes in mine. So I fixed the ones I could be bothered to fix and left it at that. But really, my troubles hadn't even started yet.

The fully assembled printer with everything but electronics. 

The way the whole software works on a 3D printer is fairly simple. The processor chip has a bootloader on it which allows you to actually use it and upload programs to it. Then there is the firmware which takes the form of a program, specifically an arduino sketch, this is what takes the instructions of what must be printed where and translates that into motor movements and this has to be calibrated and have various parameters set. The instructions of what must be printed where is stored in a file and is usually called G-code. The G-code is worked out by a 3D CAD program on a computer from a model of whatever your printing. Okay well maybe it's not that simple but the problem I'm having is getting the firmware onto the chip. Once you have the right software installed it should be a simple matter of configuring the firmware and uploading it to the controller board but whenever I try to do that I just get an "uploading" message for about ten minutes and then it times out without having uploaded anything.

I tried lots of different settings and software and got some help from some friends but no matter what I tried the error wouldn't go away. I got so desperate that I went to my local hackerspace for help because I knew they had a 3D printer there and that the place is full of nerds. I figured if they couldn't fix it, no one could. After a couple of hours of fiddling around with it they determined the problem was most likely the FTDI chip which allows the computer to communicate with the controller. Unfortunately this renders the whole board basically useless so because I know my arduino MEGA2560 works I'm going to use that instead and buy a 3D printer shield for it. So until that arrives, printer progress is halted.
I'll catch up with you again soon, cheers.