Finally the texture

Today saw the texture make it onto the death machine bed and harrow. It looked like serious rain all day, but I did it anyway, and the rain held off. Nice. Jody got a few rust colour washes onto the machine and John came in for a bit to help with the camshaft assembies.

After finishing all the rest of the needle parts I started a test assemble, then I realized I made the 'piston rods' too short. When we were initially shooting ideas around, I made a 4 needle version for the director and producer to see work. After playing around with it for a bit, I thought the needle stroke was a bit long, and assembling it the way we did was a huge pain. So I changed the file to shorten the needle throw and make the piston rods 'snap' in, instead of painstakingly trying to assemble it the old way. Well the 'snapping in' part worked well, but a failure to pay total attention to my own drawings, yielded piston rods .100" shorter and caused them to bind on the camshaft. So I re-drew them, as well as some 'safety' caps to avoid the whole crankshaft from popping out of its mounting. It kind of sucks a little to re-do work that was done once already, but Aspire and Techno cnc made VERY short work of the replacement parts. In fact, it took longer to find the material in the rack then cut all 56 parts out again!


Tomorrow should see the final assembly on the moving needles. It might take a bit to retro-fit the worm drive motor I picked up to drive it all, but it should be fairly easy.


JO