Faraday Cage

From a sketch on paper, to a deployed product. It all fits well.
General dimensions: 48"X36"X32"
Materials: Copper screen, AL 1" square, AL 1X.125" flat stock, AL 3"X.125 flat stock, 4 stainless steel hinges.

This is the drill press fixture I used for most of the machining. This was modified shortly after the picture to use strap clamps instead of Kant-Twists as Kant-twists twist quite a bit. The cage was built almost entirely on a table saw and drill press. It has almost 300 8-32 screws.

Detail of inside door area

Detail of back cornerDoors open, the space constrains were considered in the origional design, and met.

Pins and Sleeves and the use for the houses

This is a continuance of the 'monopoly houses' -- as you can see it gets more elaborate. The next piece will be bigger still. More to come on this one.

Design work

Well, I've gotten my first design job and spent a few days iterating solutions until it got simple enough to order materials. The job is to build a Faraday cage for a microscope table. Simple enough but it comes with a little apprehension the first time around. Especially ordering the materials as the aluminium tube and copper mesh are pretty expensive.
Here is a photo of some of the pages and some scraps I was using to visualize.

a very fine (meaning tiny) bit of work

My favorite piece to date. It's a sleeve that press fits on one end to the microscope lens, then has a disc of sapphire which press fits into it. My 10:1 drawing is in the picture. The piece is made out of delrin and has 3 critical dimensions. The 2 press fits and the length which needs to match the focal length. It is .282 inches long. The brass plate is a tool I made to pull it off the lens, and the black delrin round will pop the sapphire out from the back. This piece was a blast to make, 2 tools of carbide to get the finish and precision as well as the square shoulder for the lens whose seating depth is only .020 deep.

Here is a closeup.

new posts

So the old posts pictured a ways down turned out to be my first go backs. This new set incorporate improved features and look quite a bit nicer, in my opinion. I was a lot more careful about de-burring and cleaning up the tapped holes and it paid off with a really smooth feel in the hand and in operation. The tap handles on the side I made in my intro machine shop class 2 years back; I've ended up using them a lot.

Monopoloy Houses

Five very similar little pieces. Material is Aluminum, bead blasted to satin finish.
Most of the work work and the tapered 4-40 hole tapping done on the lathe. the angles on the mill, and hand filed and de-burred. These are almost done, just a chamfer in the tops of the threaded holes and polish on the angled surfaces and off they go. This was a fun job. They look very complicated but are in fact quite easy.

Finished posts

Finished posts. The titanium turned out to be very easy to work with. The carbide insert boring bar left a fantastic finish on the precision bored insides. The bead blaster made the nice satin finish on the outside. The 2 holes are .093 clearance for a pair of 2-56 screws. The lip of the part is a 2.5 inch radius holesaw cut of 1/4 inch away from the axial centerline.

in progress angle post joint

This will be 3 rod joints accepting 1/2 inch rod on one and and allowing 3/8 rod out the other end at angles of 5, 7.5, and 10 degrees. All the stainless screws are turned down 1/2 inch socket head cap screws.

At this point the 9 inch piece of 1 inch stainless round has had 3 flats machined on it and has been cold cut to rough length.

Next it will be finished to length and chamfered in the hardinge. The stright end will also be drilled in the lathe. After that, its off the the mill, for all remaining operations.