A quick little project..

Here's something I spent the last 2 days on. I recently purchased this grinder attachment for sharpening knives (Work Sharp MK2 belt sharpener) The problem with it is that you need to switch out belts a bunch, over and over and over.

The original unit (version 1) of this device kept the belt path open and made it significantly faster/easier to swap belts.

So, I took off the guard and redesigned it. The issue would be that part of the guard had this angle gauge and I would need to reproduce that in the new design.

So, I first started by using my Android phone and using the free KIRI app to scan the object.

As you can see, while the resolution wasn't great, there was enough there to get started with. I scaled it up as accurately as I could and built a first test piece to see if it would fit. It kinda did, but still needed tuning.

I used KIT OPS with a lot of DESIGN MAGIC to accurately place elements and fill out the design, knowing it would need to be continually updated. DESIGN MAGIC is great for that. Here are a few of the many test prints. The light blue ones were done in PLA and were for testing fit. I kept having to adjust the spacing. And then I figured out I needed the object to have bosses on one side and the angle guage sticking out on the other--- and I wouldn't be able to do this without serious supports, which would make the finish wonky. Not to mention I wanted to print this in Carbon Fiber PLA which would add to the support issues. So, I decided to cut it in half. You can see some of the halves on the right.

Finally, I decided to just take a picture of the original guard and see if I couldn't use it to better match all the geometry-- and it worked. So, everything fit. I tried supergluing the halves together but was afraid it wouldn't handle all the vibration so instead I bolted them together with some plastic M3 screws. Now, it was time now to figure out how to create the labeling for the angle gauge.

I remembered I had some old Rowmark Laser stock lying around and thought maybe it would work. Unfortunately all I had was orange and black and white and black. I decided to use the orange. Rowmark cuts easily on the Glowforge and when engraved it shows a dark black. I used a piece of magic transparent tape on the existing gauge and carefully marked the top and bottom degree settings and peeled it off and was able to lay it flat and copy the dimensions to Inkscape. I then was able to engrave all the orange off to leave orange lettering on a black background. I also added a logo as well.

Here's how it turned out.

You can see it's much much smaller, still contains the angle gauge and it very structurally strong. Here's an overlay in Blender of the part it replaced.

It was a fun project, and offered many challenges that were fun to try and figure out. Not sure if this content works well here, but I thought some of you might be like to hear about this sort of thing. Let me know if this is interesting or not.