20 November 2025

The old grey cells are obviously waking up, although I'm not sure I am actually in control of what they are doing. Having been struggling with the FreeCAD stuff, I've got models for the stand for the lathe, and two halves of a motor mount to take the three phase motor and allow me to tension the belt to the headstock. Initially I thought I would run the motor mount in ABS plastic since I have a reel of blue stuff, but after a couple of attempts at 3DBenchy I can see that the extruder is struggling to keep the temperature up at 250 degrees. So they are being run in red PLA and we will see if they are strong enough. While waiting for the prints, and stuck on the marble run until the wax paste arrives, sometime next week now, I thought I'd have a play with the spools for the wire dispencer. Running a side panel was easy, and I even managed to duplicate it so I could then model the spindle in between. A second scetch later I had the profile, and when I hit revolve the job was complete. It did not take at all long and exported both a dxf file of the side which has already been cut! And an STL model which has been sliced and is waiting for the printer to finish the motor base bits. I'll need to get some 1.5mm MDF but I've cut the samples in a scrap of 3mm just to check sizes. Only problem I've had is that the rendered in FreeCAD is only rendering the spindle. It's showing the sides as wire frame even though I've set the material to wood. Tried Claud, which I'd been trying to use to help we with steps, but it is basically useless at coming up with answers. It keeps giving things which I've already explained do not work, and even the advise it came up with re printing the ABS was just culled from bits I'd already supplied. No 'inteligence' in the reply at all and too often the suggestion did not work at all. The main thing I've remembered from the last time I used FreeCAD is that one HAS to build things up in stages and not get too far ahead. I'd been putting in more detail which was confusing it and stopping things like padding a part out. Definitly time to watch some videos on how to do things properly while I am waiting on printing.

One thing that I do remember having problems with was producing 2D drawings from the 3D objects, but the current version exported a suitable drawing without batting an eye, and I can see that if I needed a proper 2D drawing set I could input them into LibreCAD and add the dimensions in there.