MLYON.com » Pinion Gear http://mlyon.com Mike Lyon painting, drawing, printmaking, furniture, photography, and other stuff Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:17:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 “Shea” 77 x 45 inch pen and ink drawing http://mlyon.com/2006/12/shea-77-x-45-inch-pen-and-ink-drawing/ http://mlyon.com/2006/12/shea-77-x-45-inch-pen-and-ink-drawing/#comments Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:45:00 +0000 Mike Lyon http://mlyon.com/2006/12/shea-77-x-45-inch-pen-and-ink-drawing/ I’ve been using the Z-axis of my CNC machine to lift the pen from the paper during jogs to new drawing locations, but these very small movements of .05 inches or so have severely worn a single tooth in the pinion gear which moves the Z so it will have to be replaced… In order to avoid such uneven wear in the future, I developed a solenoid operated pen lifter which also significantly speeds completion of the drawings, as the solenoid lift and drop is almost instantaneous while the Z moves much slower… “Shea” involved about 5 million lines of movement code including over 100,000 pen lifts — seems to work quite well!

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