Friday 13 July 2012

Hello world

I picked up a Denford Router 2600 pro on ebay a couple of days past, this is just something that was on one of the disks to check it works.


Monday 9 July 2012

Superhydrophobic solution for urinals?

Another little thing I noticed when playing with my Teflon block was that I could get a stream of water to bounce off it. I'm thinking a patent for a urine guidance system to prevent splash back could be in the works ;)





Of course there may be some more serious applications but I can't think of any at the moment for the life of me.

Monday 2 July 2012

Experiments with superhydrophobia

I've been looking at superhydrophobic coatings to see if they might be a way to prevent the "wet glass" style of sticking seen in from-the-bottom DLP based 3D printers. This is a very simple way to make such a surface:





All I did was sand a block of Teflon/PFTE with some 240 grit wet and dry sand paper. This creates the required peaks on the surface that allow the already hydrophobic PTFE to become superhydrophobic. I tried this some weeks ago very briefly but it did not seem to work. Turns out that the surface is quite delicate, touching with the fingers "bruises" the surface and it looses the effect, or perhaps it is the oils from the skin.

Another cool trick was to drop the block into water, the upper surface gains a sheen due to air being trapped in the valleys of the surface structure. The water can't enter so the air is trapped.