Live data from Hacker News

Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

lulabs.net

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just need an oven with good temp control. there is this lovely bronze color you can get on stainless.its strangely alot more stable than color you get from heat treating mild steel...but i bet it would rub off if you used it a nontrivial amount

The problem I imagine would be with the corner pieces. You'd need three different temperatures for the three different faces (with stable temperature across each face). I imagine that achieving this might be still technologically possible but almost certainly non-trivial.

The only way I could see of achieving that would be to heat each face very rapidly with something like a high-powered infrared laser, so it can reach oxide-forming temperature before the heat has time to spread. The low thermal conductivity of stainless steel compared to many other metals would actually be rather useful here.

Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

#54
post #2

That'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…

"Devil's chewing gum" describing 304/316 stainless for machining is pure poetry.

Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

#55
post #27
post #20

This 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 us…

I don't know of any great resources, but from my personal experience and understanding of the landscape is that Fusion360 is the most common real CAD program used by hobbyists, and small shops (especially those that are basically "hobbyist bought a bigger mill and moved into a larger garage"). Some of the bigger places will use SolidWorks (which is what 95% of my CAD experience is in), but the price there is way out…

Solidworks now has a version for makers that costs €100/year. IMHO, that's a completely reasonable price for a tool of that caliber.

Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

#59
post #18
post #9

> 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.

Or you could increase the weight by using tungsten or depleted uranium.

Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube

#60
post #37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onshape also has a free tier [0] and is popular amongst hobbyists and education. [0] https://www.onshape.com/en/products/free

I was Chris's housemate at the time, the victim of the hours of 'sssshhhh sssshhhh shhhhh'. Interestingly, he rendered this mostly by drawing boxes in pov-ray -- I'm not sure what he used to make dimensioned drawings, but it was definitely not any of the modern CAD tools, and they were mostly for his reference. But these days, I do highly recommend Onshape -- it breaks down a lot of the 'rules' that I thought I knew…

> Before I started using Onshape, I thought that 1) all CAD software was a million billion gigabytes, and required stupidly powerful hardware for no readily apparent reason

So I take it you have never seen OKAD? ;) http://www.ultratechnology.com/okad.htm

Post reply on HN