No rush in my book just exciting to see
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Ended up being half of Lathe B yesterday, the other half tonight. I ended up needing to fiddle with a few things to get the output correct.
Good news is that none of them should be scrap. I’ve got them all paired, so when I serialize them I’ll be able to write up the character cards.
Worst defects so far are small witness lines on the OD on a couple where my finish tool didn’t quite hit the right spot and some under/over cut geometry inside the cups.
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Alright then. Keep eyes on your emails and DM’s because I’ll be sending out requests for shipping addresses by the end of the week. From there I’ll calculate shipping and adjust the final total on the invoices.
Quick Update:
I’ve got the second half of the mill stuff to get done tonight, but the machining of the earlies will be 100% completed by the time I leave the shop.
Laser marking test worked pretty well, too, though I think I might want to use the mill fixture to keep them identical once I’m done with using it in the mill. I had hoped I’d fixed the cooling issue in the laser marker last time I had it turned on, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. When I was marking unit 0001 the temperature in the resonance chamber spiked again. I’ll be tearing it apart to see what’s going on, I suppose. The chiller had some nasty bio-goop in it that kinda resembled kombucha leather, so I hope I’m not about to need to do a full sterilization and clean-out of the coolant loop. Wish me luck.
Here’s my first try on what the ID and serialization markings will actually look like, though I’ll update it to read “Riforgiate Design - Queen Bee Prototype #XX” for unit 2 and beyond.
The poll from way back when said it should go underneath the pad, so here it is. If anybody has further input, feel free to drop it here. If no changes are decided on, I’ll leave the backing on one of the pads when I ship so that you’ll be able to see which one you get.
A Few Notes:
To reiterate some stuff that I said a while back, I’m keeping #1 and #7 for myself and I believe the other poll I made about it said that I’m noting what’s “wrong” with each unit and then packing the boxes and forgetting which is which before I toss labels on them.
I will likely do an official write-up of everything that we discussed and talked about in this thread and some insights into my design at some point, but for the moment I just gotta get these out the door. Don’t know exactly what it will look like yet, but I’ll make it readily available for sure.
The wood packaging/display boxes that I was playing around with never ended up getting made, unfortunately. The buddy I was planning to work with on routing the wood hasn’t had the time to work with me on them. I still plan to make a very nice box, but it’ll need some prototyping and experimentation.
At this moment, each prototype will be sent along with both a flat bearing and a center trak bearing as well as several pairs of pads.
Each style of bearing seems to do its job pretty dang well. The yoyo becomes WAY less responsive with the center trak bearing installed for 1A play, and you can make it even less responsive depending on the string you choose. I tried to make the fit of the bearing on the post as light as I could so that they could be swapped quickly using typical means without compromising the stability of the spin. My machine isn’t repeatable to the micron, so the post dimension varies a bit from piece to piece, but on the whole they should all be pretty simple to swap.
As for pad performance, I feel it should be noted that I have a Queen in my pocket every day and I have yet to wear out the pads I put into the V1 I made last December. YMMV, but I think each pair of the cork pads should last a good while.
I’m still planning to make custom pads out of different materials like silicone, nitrile, Viton, and a few others, but the clicker stamp die I had made didn’t end up working particularly well. Kinda crushed through the material instead of cutting cleanly. I’ll need to do a bit more design work and just make a hammer die for myself with the wire EDM. Once I have a successful result, I’ll make the experimental pads freely available to everyone who bought a prototype.
That’s everything I can think of that I had talked about including. Please remind me if there’s something else that I talked about that I’m forgetting here.
Future plans:
As of now, the order form is closed for early units. I’ll still take orders for late units until I’m done with the machining for those, but as of this moment they’re gonna be a bit. I’ve had a million other things hit since I started this project, not least of which is the daughter I’ll have about this time next month. I’ll be going on paternity leave sometime between the 1st and the 13th, it just depends on when things actually happen and whether or not my wife decides to go with the C-section or not.
Current plan is to kinda split up my time off a bit between the actual delivery and the end of my wife’s maternity stuff, but we’ll have to play that by ear. While I’m home I’ll be sending out for quotes on a few finishing operations I can’t do in-house to figure out what exactly I want to do.
Then again I could be underestimating how busy I’m about to be to a literally comical degree. I’m sure I’ll find out pretty quick next month.
One way or another, the late stuff is gonna take a while yet. I’ve got a few prototype orders that have been waiting on me for a while at this point and I gotta take care of a few customers as I work toward the send-out finishing stuff.
Thank you all for your patience with the delays. It really means the world to me. I had really hoped to get the earlies out by the end of April and I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the slow going between the encoder failure, the shop upgrades, the tool optimization, the family happenings, and everything else
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First kid? If so you’re about to experience a level of tired you’ve never felt before. It’s all worth it but my advice is assume everything will take longer and life will just be more hectic for a while. Good luck, congratulations and keep sane. Most importantly spend as much time as you can enjoying the time with your baby cause they are only that small once.
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This. For 9 months people kept saying things like “get ready to be tired heehee” but no, nobody actually said for real what they meant. They meant get ready to get 3 hours of sleep over a 72 hour period, repeatedly for 3+ months. Get ready for a level of tired you never knew existed, the kind where as soon as you aren’t holding a baby you are running into walls and dropping stuff.
Get ready to be so tired that when you do return to work you pack your to go lunch and when lunch time arrives and you open your lunch box you find breast pump parts in your lunch box instead of food with no memory of packing them.
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16 earlies total. No scrap. I even got them all serialized!
I’m keeping 2, and then I’m sending 2 more out into the world into trade chains. 12 to distribute to people who ordered them, which satisfies all the early orders and then some.
I’ve still gotta get the evaluations done, but like I said in my last post, keep eyes on your inboxes.
Material: 6Al4V Titanium (Grade 5)
Diameter: 2.23in/56.64mm
Width: 1.375in/34.9mm (need to double check, but I don’t think I changed that)
Gap: 0.100in/2.54mm
Mass: ~59.5g (early units are somewhat wobbly around this number, skewing heavy)
Bearing: NSK MR105 5x10x4mm (Flat Size A or center trak)
Response: Cork Brake Pad
I dunno about that. My record is 4½ days with no sleep whatsoever and I’m regularly up until 2 or 3 in the morning anyway. With the entirely unearned confidence of a man who knows literally nothing about the experience, I think I’ll do ok 
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yoo congrats with the kid homie hope everything goes well lmao
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The thing that got me was folks that had done military or survivalist or whatever would say they know tired but it’s so different when your looking after someone else who can’t do anything for themselves and fully depends on you vs just trying to keep yourself going. Not to say someone keeping their brothers going in the line of duty isn’t stressful and exhausting it’s a totally different thing but your adrenaline isn’t going up as you hold and rock a baby. I’ll admit my first born I fell asleep holding him on the couch and dropped him and had a panic attack about it but kid was fine. Thankfully babies are pretty durable
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Babies are made of chicken bones and rubber for this very reason
My gosh though. My son only slept while held for the first 8 months. Literally nothing worked. What we ended up doing was my wife and I took shifts at night. I would go sleep for 4 hours while she held him on the couch for 4 hours. Then I would wake up and hold him for 4 hours playing video games while she got her turn at sleep. Burned through a lot of my steam back catalog.
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OK, the bones are up:
I need to go through this thread and REALLY fill out the page soon.
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mega hype for these! Thank you for keeping us all up to date throughout the process <3
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Absolutely! With the massive delay in getting things done I feel it was only right. Plus this has proven to be a very fun community to engage with 
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Just don’t burn yourself out. I’m done waiting a year for something and getting cool projects every now and then vs all at the front end then fizzle out
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is it possible to request mine have any markings/engravings/serialization under the pads instead of visible?
The only 2 units with markings NOT under the pads are the 2 play chain units. I needed a way to differentiate them and keep them readily identifiable to other people.
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tfw you were already ahead of me, thank you friend!!
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