After doing my mods to the rollers I thought I would try a little glass engraving.
I think it came out pretty good. Towards the end of the cutting you will see me having to add some pressure to the top of the glass. This is because I still need to get rid of my 7/16" sagging rods LOL.
I forgot that it would do that in that area or I would have made up for it in the code. All the more reasons for me to put my 5/8" rods on.
The nativity scene was borrowed from Switchers dxf blog site. Thanks Switcher.
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/8186156[/vimeo]
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That is AWESOME Shaun!
I would have never considered doing this. What is the bit you are using to grind the glass?
I think the MKII may fare well with this having the double pressure rollers up front.
Super job and thank you so much for the props in the credits
You ROCK!!
Mark

 

Do you think you could do this with plexi and a v groove bit? That would look nice.
Changing out the rollers is one of the features I wanted to the MKII so that if you wanted to do this very thing you can easily swap them out and run smooth material. I have to make up a set of these.
Mark

 

shaun, very cool bud...

 

Yea, what bit and how deep were you cutting/grinding? That is cool!

 

Thanks for the comments guys.

The bit I'm using is one of those diamond coated bits made for etching glass. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but this one I used was a sphere. I programmed it to go .030 above the surface of the table for the engraving. This lifts the glass off the table a little which keeps good pressure on the bit.

The rollers work fine on the foam and they don't mar the surface, but make note that the rollers will let any material slip without pressure. In my x axis and pressure roller mod thread you can see how I added the adjustable pressure mod to the main pressure roller so I can get the right amount of pressure. I'm not sure the weighted roller mod will be enough that most of you guys have been doing.

I really think the MKII with a pressure roller mod would be awesome for this sort of stuff. The way Mark designed the y axis makes it impossible for the weight of the dremel to sag in the middle like my MK1.5 has been doing.

I'm sure if the glass had masking tape on the outer edges the regular rollers would grip the glass just fine too.

 

That is one of the things I've been wanting to try out as well.
I think doing a relief engraving in plexi or some sort of clear plastic and then putting it in a box with an led back lighting it would be awesome.

 

I see they can use a white plastic to engrave in then using charcoal to fill in the scratches.
The plastic is put into a box with a light inside and it comes out nice looking

 

Hey Peter,
I already did. It's in my aluminum tube mod thread here: http://www.phlatforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=1268

 

I have an added uptate to how these rollers are working with foam.
At first they seemed ok but the more I used them I noticed a lot of skewing. I really like these rollers so I just use fences for the foam to travel.
With the fences up everything works perfect.

 

Shaun I was afraid of that, but even more than that, when I wrapped the tool box liner on the one I did on the show. I noticed the same movement would occur when I was first prototyping the Phlatprinters using rubber roller test. That's when I stopped with that and have gone back to the drawing board. If there is a small amount of movement in the rubbers surface in comparison to its base it will act as if it was a lost step over several movements because the roller is always a minute amount ahead of the surface of the rubber. Its kind of like a dragsters tires at the starting line. It takes a little while for the tire to catch up to the torque of the rim. You really do not see it much with the rubber roller but it is.
I have been looking more into this for the BB build and as I test I will let you know what I find out.
Mark

 

Well to add to this, I must say my foam zero's back to where it is suppose to. When I had the tread grip on the rollers the fanfold was always off when it returned too zero. Plywood has no problems either.