Over the weekend Sunk robotics got second in the MATE ROV New England Regional. We were a little disapointed by this, because we won the previous three, but we weren’t particularly surprised by it. We are thinking of pivoting towards making our own ROV’s

Monday

I decided to start a new project in the machine shop. A machinist hammer. I wanted to do a few different things on this hammer. I wanted replaceable faces, and wanted the ability to make it a deadblow. The repleaceable faces are important if I ever want to change the material, or geometry of the faces, and the deadblow is more of an experiment. I started by looking up other examples of hammers, and modeled my own.

Tuesday

On tuesday I started turning the handle. I was having a really tough time with getting a good surface finish on the handle, because of the cutter geometry. I was lubricating, running at the right surface speed, and taking about .002 per rev. I could up it, but its over now. After that was to diameter, I knurled it. I didn’t get quite the pattern I wanted, so I faced it and tried again, which went much better.

Surface Finish
I think my stepover was a little too small and it was tearing instead of cutting,
Finished knurling
I don’t know why the picture is upside down, but it is. It did a really weird double knurling thing.

Wednesday

After that I faced the stem of the handle to the right diameter, and drilled and tapped the end for the 3/8-16 thread, then parted it off. After that it was time to start working on the head. I chucked up my material, and started to face it down to the right diameter. This gave me some room to play with speeds and feeds to get the best surface finish. I ended up making a really nice surface finish.

Stem
With a different tool, it works muuuuch better and gets a halfway decent surface finish
Surface Finish
This is the surface finish on the head.
Blue Chips
The really good surface finish made blue chips. This tells me that enought of the cutting heat is being evacuated into the chip, which is a good sign. This being said, the part was still really hot.

Thursday

After that I drilled the inside, and then tapped the center for 1/2 - 20. This was 2 inches of continous tapping. It took a riduclously long amount of time, at least 30 mins, I don’t ever want to do that again. After that I parted it off and it was the end of the day.