Wow, what a gorgeous piece of work. If you ever want to make something out of 304 and you're having problems: if you are too gentle with your cuts it will tend to 'smear', you really need to cut, probably a lot more aggressive than you might think if you are used to taking it easy on Aluminum and other soft metals which are pretty forgiving. 304 is not. The machinists joke is that it isn't hard, it's just hard to work.
Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
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Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#12That's very cool, and a beautiful piece in the end. Good choice to do it in 303. 316 really is a pain. The ingenuity required to get things like this one on manual tools (especially pre-DRO, but even now) is amazing. Starting out machining, I expected the machining to be the hard part, but often a lot more time is spent on planning, fixturing, set-up, and so on. For example, the idea of making custom vise jaws to hol…
Yes, fixing stuff is one of the harder problems, as is avoiding toolstrikes or having to re-grip something because your carefully laid plans are messed up by the cutting depth or stability of your tools. Sometimes you spend more time figuring out how to safely grip a workpiece than you do on the actual machining.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#13He missed an opportunity to color the engravings on each side with the same colors from the original cube. I think it would have looked even better. But still incredible regardless.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#14My first thought was: how the heck could you assemble a metal cube? Putting a plastic one together relies on the springiness of the material in order to place the final piece, but metal won't give in the same way. The solution: > The face centers each receive a hollow stem that screws into the 5/16-24 thread. This assembly holds a captive spring-loaded screw, which screws into the core. The spring provides some give…
I had the same thought but just tested with a fairly standard "premium" plastic cube (not Rubick's brand) and I think it works in the same way. There are springs and that allows assembly/disassembly and I think it would work with a less flexible material. Not sure if the Rubick's brand ones are the same or if they really do rely on flexible plastic.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#15Very cool! Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing). That surely would feel strange with the varying d…
I think that it would be difficult to keep everything clean enough to avoid galvanic corrosion at the metal interfaces once someone has touched it. I experienced surprisingly rapid corrosion when securing copper lugs using zinc-plated steel nuts and bolts until I started handling them exclusively with gloves.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#16This is extremely cool!
I wonder if the relative similarity of the designs on the faces makes it particularly difficult to tell them apart, although if it's mostly for display that shouldn't matter much.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#17I just bought a shower cassette removal tool (looks like Moen 104421), it's machined aluminum. I'm pretty sure I could make it myself...I couldn't make it for $15 and no time spent. This makes me sad.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#18> Although it may be neat to look at, it weighs a massive three pounds (~1.4 kg) and is very tiring to manipulate. Solving this is more a test of the wrists than of the mind! This was the punchline I was looking for. The aluminum version seem like a more desirable version at 500g.
I wonder if one can hollow out the individual cubes to decrease the weight.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#19I was kind of hoping the faces would be heat-colored but I imagine that would have been a bit more complex.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#20This is so cool, stuff like this makes me wish I had studied mechanical engineering instead of computer science.
Does anyone know of a good route for learning the software stack associated with this stuff? I keep up with some maker YT channels like Stuff Made Here and they usually do an okay job of showing which machines were used and how each piece was made. But what they usually never show is which programs they used to model and mock up their creations before they started machining.
I'd really love to learn more about CAD modeling and designing these kinds of projects but I don't know how to get started.