Projects

Pneumatic Motor

I love engines, plain and simple. While I have dissembled and rebuilt small 2-stroke motors in the past, I have always wanted to design and build something that was completely my own. By using compressed gas as a source of energy, I was able to do just that.

This motor was designed in Fusion 360, and 3D printed out of PETG. It was designed to use real rubber seals and gaskets, as well as metric threaded hardware and standard 608 bearings. The motor requires no gluing to assemble and can be opened and maintained in a manner similar to a real engine. It runs easily on around 2 bar of pressure but is designed to withstand pressures up to 100 psi safely.

Pellet-fed 3D printer toolhead

3D printing is one of my favorite hobbies, and I am always using my machines. One thing that has always frustrated me about printing is how expensive the plastic filament is, relative to the cost of the bulk plastic pellets it is made from. To resolve this issue and allow me to print using a wider array of industry standard materials (TPUs, TPES, GF PP, PE), I designed and made a toolhead for a 3D printer which accepts plastic pellets directly. This project had to go through a major redesign during its development, which involved using thermal simulations to optimize the thermal isolation of the heating barrel. Metal parts were custom machined for the project out of stainless steel and aluminum, and the orange feed hopper was SLA printed out of a thermally resistant resin. The central feed screw was made using a metal powdered bed 3D printing process and minimized the cost to make the complex geometry needed.