So my first term of second year mechanical engineering has come to a close with an 80.83 average, and I can’t wait to start my work term. Only problem is that I need a job still (cough, cough).
Anyways, moving out is always a fun time of year when you drive a station wagon. Everything fits, there’s room left over, and you can still see out your windows.
After moving out, I had a few objectives:
- Doing my sparkplugs/air filter/oil change
- Cleaning out my garage and add cabinets
- Helping my friend apply parts to his Mustang
- CNC Mill things
Imminently after emptying my car out, I carefully ripped apart my intake and moved things out of the way. The plugs and filters were ordered from autopartsway.ca in advance, they’re really a great retailer to deal with because of domestic shipping (no ridiculous UPS brokerage charges). No detailed writeup here, it’s a blog (you can find write ups in the 55k maintenance thread on Audiworld forums).
Next order of business was to cause my garage to puke out garbage over my driveway. I promised some time ago there would be a cleanup, and its happened now. My garage was previously packed with about 10 garbage bags of useless broken things I would never reuse (like cracked halloween buckets and old sway bar links). There was also a lack of space to walk because garbage and recycling bins were placed in front of benches. My benches all had lower shelves which prevented them from being stored conveniently underneath, which gave me a good excuse to build a better one.
The bench actually started life as a home-made pool table I made when I was 10. It was later cut in half and converted into a work bench becasue I had friends with real pool tables. The plan was to have a narrower bench with a full width drawer and have space to store garbage and recycling underneath. The narrower profile would discourage garbage from piling up at the back of the bench, never to be touched for many years. Within a few hours with some help from a friend, the workbench had been evolved.
I had planned for this about a year ago, and it feels great to finally have a clean workspace again with tons of storage. The massive drawer is held up by a 4 bar linkage made of 2x4s and door hinges, counterbalanced by surgical tubing. LED strips have been ordered to light everything nicely.
Next up was installing a new grille, splitter, lower valence, and rear diffuser on my friend’s mustang, which proceeds to puke out more parts onto my driveway. Tearing apart an expensive car is always nerve-racking and exciting. I’ll update with more shots later.
With my remaining time, I got some plexiglass and turned it into a ring light for my mill spindle. I really felt like just making something easy, so I sketched out the ring and determined simple enough. My ghetto wood fixture worked great here, the finish on the circle was pretty even. All the gcode was generated by Mach3 “wizards” which were easy enough to use. 
The finished ring has an inner diameter about equal to the spindle for a tight fit. It’s meant to have 5mm LEDs pressed in around the circumference and provide some diffused light so I can finally see what I’m milling.
Oh, one last thing. I got a new camera so expect much better images in the future with narrow depth of field etc. Possibly video and regular blog updates as well.
Kenneth Wong 