Our original milling machine has undergone several modifications since we purchased it.

First was a new longer bed and then a diy CNC conversion with the control box being relocated, and in December 2009 we purchased a belt drive kit to make it quieter to use. This was followed by a RPM monitor a couple of weeks ago using a optical sensor.

The one thing the mill has always needed was to be made more precise for CNC milling and the original lead screws had too much play in the threads to enable us to work with small tolerances. We had planned to get ballscrews and ballnuts when we first did the CNC upgrade but they are very expensive to buy and had difficultly obtaining the sizes we needed.

Last week a pair of 8mm shaft ballscrews with 18mm ballnuts appeared on ebay for under £100 so we purchased them to upgrade the X and Y axis on the mill. We will upgrade the Z axis later but we are looking into alternatives for the current cast iron column and runners.

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When we purchased the milling machine which was later converted to be CNC we also purchased a Axminster SIEG C1 Micro Lathe, the lathe was ok for working with larger materials (over 3mm) but due to excessive vibration from the machine when it was running it wasn't possible to work smaller materials and get a consistent finish.

Recently we needed to make some small parts on the lathe and found that it wasn't possible so we decided to see if we can improve it!

Removal of the covers and replacement of various parts narrowed the source of the vibration to the standard pulleys which had over .5mm offset which caused a lot of issues and the motor mount which flexed a lot when under load.

The original machine before starting work.

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To enable taskbar previews for the latest firefox update under Windows 7

Go to: about:config in the address bar and scroll or search to find:

browser.taskbar.previews.enable

Double click to enable taskbar previews

Yesterday my old G5 Apple iMac started to crash and have screen corruption with windows appearing to freeze and then leave parts behind when moving around. After a hour the computer was crashing as soon as it booted and the startup logo developed distortion and lines across the screen and ended up with the display being completely unusable.

After removing the cover on the iMac I found that 4 of the capacitors on the main logic board had expanded and blown which were located in the areas circled below.

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I have updated the site gallery with a flickr feed of my latest updates to Flickr

http://www.briandorey.com/gallery/gallery.aspx

Windows 7 has a handy feature called God Mode which enables you to have a folder where you can get to all the settings without having to browse around and click through options and folders in Control Panel.

To enable God Mode, add a new folder to your desktop and name it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You will then have a God Mode Icon on your desktop. This lets you change loads of your Windows 7 settings in one place.

These were taken using the full Bowens studio kit to light the item using softboxes and light the background with separate lights to give a more even light over the items.

Below are some new samples of what we can do with the rotary table we built for 360 degree stock photography

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After looking at various ways to show stock items in a better format for our ecommerce sites we thought it would be good to have 360 rotating images of the items.

Commercial systems to do this cost thousands and as we already have a Manfrotto 300N Panoramic Head for my tripod we decided to use this to make a round table top to use on the panoramic head.

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