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My Visco machine


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wow, i think ill follow through with your design, its looks not too hard and not too easy to build,but mostly because its hand powdered, that greatly reduces the risks of an "accident". ;)
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PGF, can you post some pictures of your machine?

I think I'll try build one like yours too.

 

ohh, and measures of the transmission wheels you used will be appreciated too. ^_^

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PGF, can you post some pictures of your machine?

I think I'll try build one like yours too.

 

ohh, and measures of the transmission wheels you used will be appreciated too. ^_^

Understood. I'll post some pics tomorow when i get back from my workshop.

 

The transimission wheels are as follows

 

2x 75mm on the drive shaft that power the spinerettes

2x 25mm for the spinerettes

1x 50mm for the collection drum

1x 15mm on the drive shaft that power the collection drum

 

The measurements are all for the groove on the transmission wheels, so actuall outside diameter is about 5mm larger. Hope you understand as i'm not very good at explaining how the transmission wheels were measured.

 

Cheers

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  • 3 weeks later...
Dose anyone know how to make the funnel on the first rotating wheel? I saw that there was a specific drill bit you could use, but dose anyone have any alternative methods?
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Thats what I ended up using. I built a successfull machine in 2 hours. That was so easy! (Pictures to fallow)
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Nice! I was bored when I woke up this morning, so I started working on a machine.. I've got some of the parts in the anodizing bath now. I made a couple pulleys out of my old BP die (bondo). The discs are made out of an old cutting board I've been slicing up. I'll take a pic of part of it.. One of them didn't anodize well, so I'll redo it tommorow.

 

http://www.apcforum.net/files/DCP_2405.JPG

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Those parts look great.... I anod'd my old paintball gun frame and it came out decently.... Light blue was hard for me to ano lol, but red was pretty easy... and it looks good

 

Maybe I'll made a visco machine also... I have tons of thread, lots of wood/foam board stuff...

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I'm actually interested in making very large visco, something between visco and time fuse. I might even experiment with using two towers, and dunking in tar like real time fuse. It sounds messy, though. I can think of ways to do it - have the second tower positioned above the tar dip, and just wind the second set of strings upwards, or do a paper tape wrap over the tar. Someone mentioned a setup where the tar was put on the paper, and then wrapped on the visco, I wondered how that was done and the wrapping completed.

 

On another note, how important is the size of the hole after the funnel? Ie where the first wrapping goes down the tube. I think maybe I was overly ambitious when I bored it out, not a big deal cause I can just stick another tube in there, but I thought I'd ask now. I'm thinking this is the hole that controls the size of the powder core? Maybe I'll make a set of inserts to drop in, then I can make different sizes.

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  • 3 weeks later...

We (me and my gf) finally got working on the machine yesterday, and this is what it looks like so far:

 

http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee141/Sylar8472/fusemach.jpg

 

Now we stumble upon the problem of the correct pulling speed for the fuse collection drum.

 

I have 3 ways to influence this:

-The Central driving shaft pulley diameter

-The diameter of the pulley under the collection drum

-The diameter of the collection drum itself.

 

My pulley diameters are fixed between 15 and 50 mm, and I can't have the collection drum diameter too small either.

Otherwise the more fuse gets on it, the faster it starts pulling ...

 

So I was kinda looking for a lenght per 100 rotations or something to calculate the whole thing up. Any ideas?

 

 

Edit and excuses for the bulky post:

 

I pried a piece of bought fuse open to find:

http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee141/Sylar8472/lont_1.jpg

http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee141/Sylar8472/lont_2.jpg

 

An outer layer of 8 strings over a distance of 11 mm

A paper(-like) foil

An inner layer of 14 strings over a distance of 16 mm (with probably 2 central pulling strings included, as seen in the fireworks making documentary)

 

This means the 2 layers of strings have virtually the same rotation per pulling, and I have to calculate the pulling speed to 11 mm per rotation of the spools.

visco_machine.dwg

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It was our intention to do that in a second step, but it might be possible to work it into this machine aswell ...

 

Meanwhile I have made the fuse collection drum to a diameter of 37 mm, but this is still about 4 times too fast according to my calculations :mellow:

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I saw a video on chinese firecracker making a while back, and they showed the chinese visco machine making fuse. The drying line - and it looked like hot weather - was like 4-6 passes over a hundred foot stretch. You could probably get away with a lot less if you used a heater or something to quick dry it. Then again, if you got it dry, you could always let it dry on the spool for a week or two.

 

Interestingly, lacquer takes about 30 days to fully cure.

 

It looks like you could have enough room to use a double reduction for the take-up spool. That could get you the 4:1 if your belting can flex that much.

 

What do you use for belts? O-Rings? I was wanting to get some watchmaker's lathe type round belt. It can be melted together but I'm having trouble finding it now. It was being sold on ebay for a while.

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If you are talking about the orange or green plastic belting that can be melted together try contacting an industrial belting/hose shop. I use this type of belting on my ball mill, and can get it in locally. Depending on how much you need I may have some around at my work... There is a special element and jig to connect it, but I have done it using a lighter and even a soldering gun.
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The belts I use on this machine are glued together using cyano acrylate glue.

I believe it to be standard 6 mm low force belting material and should be widely available in a lot of hardware stores that deal with gears and belts.

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How did you connect with cyanoacrylate, did you glue them together in the ends, or did you glue them together on the side of the end?

Hope you know what I mean...

I'm gonna connect a rubberstrip to make a belt for my pulleys, but I had no idea that cyanoacrylate would hold up the tension...

 

Also I could not download the video, just get a bunch of codes in my browser, are there any ways you could upload it a different place?

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One way of making cheap'n dirty belts are inflatable rubber tubing used for tires. They come in all sizes, you just cut the round rubber tube a little bit bigger than you nedd and voila: you have a cheap and easy elastic rubber band. On tubing can make A LOT of bands...
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The belting material I used is to be cut and glued across the pulling direction.

In fact, I think every belt glued with cyanoacrylate glue should be glued in this way, because the glue itself is not able to stretch like the belt material is.

 

EDIT: if by video, you mean the dwg file it is very possible you get a bunch of code instead of anything if you don't have autocad 2006 installed, because it is an autocad drawing file. If you want I can make a gif of it, but that doesn't even come close to holding the same amount of information.

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Depending on how much you need I may have some around at my work... There is a special element and jig to connect it, but I have done it using a lighter and even a soldering gun.

I just ordered some 3mm and 5mm - doh! But I have a round nose tool for my lathe that is 7mm, which the guy didn't have. If you have a couple feet of the 7mm, that'd work great.

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Givat: I have not completed my visco machine yet, that's a sort of back burner project; however, I have read about all I can find. It seems 50 mesh and lower granular/corning dust works best. Too coarse and it can quickmatch, too fine and it burns too slowly. I'm sure it depends on how hot your BP is also, and how good your mill is.
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Additional, a small grain (like table salt) will cause less flow problems in the funnel and spill less out of the sides of the fuse during handling while uncoated.

 

My first test run was with ordinary flour and it a nightmare to work with because it blocked my funnel and spilled out of the fuse because it just has a way too small particle size.

 

My idea about the matter is, if you can scoop some up on the round side of a teaspoon, you might get funnel problems. It should be dry and free-flowing.

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My problem isn't wasting BP or making every thing bp dirty, My problem is that the BP just don't wants to get into the fuse! =\

 

here are some pictures:

http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9996/visco2bm4.th.jpghttp://img232.imageshack.us/img232/9426/visco3lx2.th.jpg

 

I tried using flour like ball milled BP and graind BP, both with no success.

 

Any suggestions any one? :mellow:

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