Apologies for the fat-finger submission last week. The "publish" and "preview" buttons are really close together in our Wordpress blog software:) Anyways, here's a few things that we've been up to in the lately. PGC (Personal Gantry Crane) First, our newest toy in the Tormach Shop - a portable 2000 lbs. gantry crane. Perfect for lifting the machine onto the stand, or a rotating 4th axis on to the PCNC table. I think it will fit in most garages as well. We've talked about getting one for a while, and it didn't disappoint. This one is an aluminum frame with large locking casters and a really nice made trolley. [nggallery id = 78] Progress on the Tormach Lathe Here are the lathe castings for the first prototypes of our slant bed CNC lathe project. These are now being built up at the factory and we expect to see the first prototypes in the fall. Steady progress, albeit somewhat slower than we had initially hoped for. Farewell to the Stirlings Finally, we've had a lot of fun making these Stirling Engines in our CNC Fundamentals Workshop over that last two years. The class last week had some of the best ones yet, like this one built by Kenny from TN. We Tach'd it at around 200RPM. As anybody who's played around with one of these coffee cup engines knows, they can be real finicky to get running, but Kenny had his cranking away the on the very first spin - call us impressed! Alas, this is a swan song for the Stirling project - after having almost 200 students build these during the class, we've decided to retire the Stirling project for the moment and will be building a very cool dial indicator holder in the future. This new project has some challenging parts and I think it will be a great teaching tool.
