Oneshop has a laser engraver, the Voccell DLS can cut through and engrave quite a few materials and I was very excited to try it out. So I asked Tyler for a quick rundown on the machine and I was off. It's extremely simple to run and there is a list of materials and what outputs for each one to achieve certain things like cutting vs engraving. I did a few test runs with wood using my logo from my small side business and the speed and ease of use are insane! 

I tried it on a piece of metal with not nearly as good of an outcome but still showed up. I tried it with a painted one and anodized but pretty much the same outcome on both where it would only really show at an angle. 

After doing a couple of different test runs of a straight logo and things of that nature, I was curious on what would happen if I tried using an image and converting it to a point where it would show up on wood and still be recognizable. I found an image I liked and tried imputing it directly into the software that creates the g-code for the laser engraver, but it came up very dark and filled the entire area with a straight color which was not what I wanted as you couldn't make out anything in it. Then I remembered my father getting an app that would convert an image to have a sketchy look to it, like a hand drawing. I decided to download the app and convert the image through there, then plug it into the machine and see what would come out. This too didn't have the desired outcome, it would only show the more defined lines which didn't show very much only the bare outlines. I then took the image into photoshop and played around with the contrast, exposure and brightness to a point where I got the sketched lines to be a straight color instead of grayscale. I plugged it into the machine for an example and it looked much more promising. However, the image was of two people (my sister and her boyfriend) and his eyes came up as a straight black blob where you couldn't make out anything. I decided to clean that up manually which only took a couple of minutes and helped a lot with recognizing the people in the photo. 

Here is a photo of the final outcome and before image:

Today, when I got to Oneshop the router for the CNC machine, wouldn't turn on, the light would come on indicating that it has power, just the tool wouldn't spin. Was looking around thinking maybe a cord came loose or something of the sort, but nothing was loose. I asked Tyler (oneshop owner) about it and he said the brushes on the motor top may have worn down sufficiently to need to be replaced. Thankfully he had a couple of extra which I installed and that got it working again without a hitch.

After starting up another cut of Kevin (small circular paperweight) it started without issue and ran through about 80% of its path before it suddenly stopped moving. This was a bit annoying and I had noticed it doing the same with another cut. After posting this on Instagram, my brother mentioned having the same issue and that the solution was to lower the tolerance from its default 0.004in to something rougher and just create a new toolpath to clean it up afterward to get a cleaner finish. The reason it does that is the computer has to calculate each layer and multiplies over and over to the point where it overloads and crashes. I believe this is just an issue with this specific machine though I haven't tried it on the larger one they have.

Unfortunately, today didn't start off on a very good foot. Number one, I forgot to save my files from what I did before so I had to start from scratch, which I didn't think would be an issue. Second, I forgot a few of the steps to getting started. My first problem arose when I tried setting the tool for the router and it wouldn't accept a 1/8" drill bit when I put in all the info. I tried other bits and those worked without issue. I called my brother up @jehtradedollar and asked him why this would be. I feel pretty dumb because this was specifically mentioned in the tutorial I watched nearly a dozen times, and that is, drill bits can't be used to mill out a stock, they can only be used for up and down, so drilling a hole straight down would be an example. He said that if its some cheap bit that doesn't have specifications on the packaging then just to set it as either a flat tip or ball. In this case, I chose a ball head tip even though the actual bit is something different. One of the other issues I kept running into was the router would dive into the wood. How it should work is a slow spiral down descending at about .5mm per layer until it touched the wood at which point it would slow down even more and continue on its toolpath. This would prevent it from starting too early if you were to set the y-axis too high, or measured something wrong in the program. The issue I was having is where the machine would stall as its rising then crash down skipping a gear and the machine would think it's still high above the wood and would cut more than it could eat. The problem, like the other one, was pretty obvious, the wood I was using was 1 5/16" and the router was set too low so when it was raised it would get raised to the maximum height at which point it would stall, then plummet. The solution for this was simple and had a couple of different options. The one I went with was to swap the wood out with something shorter. This was a simple fix which may not be a solution for larger parts. Another fix would be to set the router higher, this would allow the maximum height to be set higher and so wouldn't stall going over 1.5". Another solution would be to set the raised height at which the router descends from to start its spiral to be lower over the wood. For this I set it to be about 1/2" above the wood at which point it would start its descent. 

I started a project a couple of weeks ago to build a tracer unit for my airsoft rifle. 

What is a tracer unit you might ask?

Without going deep into it, a tracer unit is a small unit that attaches to the end of your barrel that lights up whenever a bb passes through it. These bb's are not any bbs but glow in the dark ones. Glowing in the dark bb's is mostly useful for dark rooms and helps to see what you are firing at without using a flashlight that would give away your position.

The issue with buying them was, plain and simple, the price. For a half-decent tracer unit, it will run you upwards of $75. I was not about to pay that for such a small improvement.

That's where I started to think up a design for my tracer unit. I began by acquiring a pack of ultraviolet LEDs from amazon and used that as a base to start 3D modeling. I was initially going to have it 5" long, and seven sets of LEDs, two per set. After modeling a quick prototype, I printed it and tested by tossing a bb through. It lit up as it passed through, and stayed lit for 3-5 seconds.

Then, looking to improve and give it an overall smaller profile, I lowered the sets of LEDs to 3 instead of the 7. Using 6 LEDs, I dropped a glow-in-the-dark bb, and it lit for several seconds after it passed through.

Next, I had to figure out how to wire everything and keep it all small and concise. I at first looked into fitting a AAA battery inside of it somehow but abandoned that as it would require 3.4v to give it the proper illumination, and AAA's only gave 1.5v. Then I started looking into wiring it to the gun itself. I wouldn't need to take it off very often, and I have a mock peq box on the front of my rifle that I could use to house the battery. From there, I designed two holes in which I could feed the + and - wires through. From there I would have them each run down a side of the tracer unit, and each of the LED wires would be soldered to their corresponding side.

After figuring the wiring setup, I went back to the battery. I had an issue; I wanted to use AAA batteries as they were small enough to fit inside the peq box and could hold enough charge to last a while. After doing a bit of researching, I found that if you put connect batteries, you can increase the voltage, essentially adding 1.5v every cell I attached. From there I soldered three batteries end to end, positive to negative as a pack using metal plates I manufactured out of some scrap conductive metal. After spending an hour or two trying to figure out why it wasn't giving the proper voltage (1.5v with three batteries instead of 4.5), I figured out that I wired it wrong. I had soldered the plates properly, just connected the wires to the wrong sides. I fixed that, and it gave the propper voltage output (around 4.2v).

I decided against going through the headache of trying to figure out how to use light sensors to detect when a bb passes through the tracer unit. It seemed like a lot of work for not a lot of gain, maybe a for a future project. I had also bought a pack of on-off switches, I wired the battery up to it, and everything worked like it should and lit up properly.

Then I put it on my gun... and well, it didn't work as it should. The bbs barely held any of its charges and died very shortly after firing. Maybe half a second after it left the barrel it died. It was very disappointing; the LEDs illumination was at its max output. Anyway long story short, those LED's weren't going to work. And this is where the project halted; I could order new, larger LEDs, which I would imagine would fix the issue. Until then, this is a failed project.

What is a carbine kit, and why is it useful?

In airsoft, and with real guns, there is a thing called a carbine kit which pretty much converts a handgun/pistol into a full carbine. The primary purpose of this is to have more stability and the option of optics as a secondary. Here is a photo of a Glock Carbine Kit designed for a 9mm handgun. 

Was there an existing product, and is it worth buying?

There have been carbine kits made for quite a few different model handguns, except the ASG CZ-P09. This particular gun is ubiquitous in the airsoft world and performs exceptionally well for its price. There have been several individuals that have made their P09 carbine kit but none on the market. Carbine kits, in general, are not very popular. The reason being is that if you want a full carbine, you will buy one. And if you want a handgun, you'd just run with the gun, which means that demand, in general, is not very high.

Design Inspiration

After asking around on a few different sites to see if people would be interested in purchasing a carbine conversion kit for the CZ P09, it looks like there is a small market for them.

I started by looking at different existing carbine kits via google and looking at how other carbine kits had been designed and standard features. Initially, I was not going to add an extra mag holder as it seemed like a lot of work for something that wouldn't be very useful, but after watching reviews of them, I found that it would be worth modeling.

After a bit of digging, I found a design I liked, the SRU Carbine Conversion Kit for the Glock17 and like models. I loved this particular carbine kit for its small body and compact look about it. The carbine kit would attach to the underside of the rail on the P09. There would be an inverted rail as apart of the carbine kit body and once the gun is in you would screw a nut upwards to fasten the P09 to the carbine kit securely. The folding stock idea came from an old Airsoft AK47. It had a folding stock that locks into place using a spring and ledge to keep it from folding to the side when in use.

First product

I started the design process by importing a 3D model of the P09 to use as a base and design around. In addition to the 3D model of the P09, I was able to get my hands on one as well to get more precise measurements. I knew from the outset that I wanted a mag holder and folding stock to set it aside from your typical carbine kit. I also knew that I wanted to have a two-tone one to make it stand out, and it would help with breaking the design up for ease of printing.

After a few hours of modeling and finding all the constraints, I fell upon a design I liked and printed a piece of it to test the size on the gun. It 3D printed beautifully and attached correctly to the underside of the rail on the P09 itself. I only printed the front rail portion that attaches to the gun rather than 3D Printing the entire model.

Before getting my hands on the actual P09 gun, I used the model I found online as a base and just modified it afterward to get more precise measurements. Starting without the P09 in hand gave me issues down the line, I wanted to make sure I had plenty of wiggle room in case the P09 3D model was off. It was a mistake to design this way because it meant that everything was more substantial than what was strictly necessary and would require a lot more work to prevent the final product from having a lot of bulk to it. The folding stock turned out very well for a first attempt and needed hardly any modifications to bring it up to excellent working order.

Below is a video of the folding stock, prototype:

Read more

After understanding the basics of how a gearbox works we can now go into some of the more complicated stuff such as increasing the accuracy of your gun.

One very important thing you want in an airsoft gun is accuracy. Before I get into how to increase your accuracy there is one thing I need to clear up. Accuracy is consistency, meaning you want your bb to travel where you are expecting it to go. The gun is always accurate in the sense that the bb will travel where it's going to travel, but you want to know where it will travel and you want it to go there every time.

One way of doing this is upgrading the quality of the inner barrel as well as the diameter of it. The tighter the inner barrel is the less room it has to veer off in a different direction. The quality of the inner barrel is key for overtime ware and are keeping it as seamless as possible.

Another way to increase accuracy is to upgrade the bucking (rubber piece on the barrel for hop up) and here you have a few options. You can simply go with a higher quality bucking or you can go with different styles. The typical style you will find in most guns is around oval being pushed down upon the bb from the top. This works but is not the most effective as if it is even 2mm off center your bb will veer off in a different direction then desired. 

Another form of hopup is called the flat hop. This is essentially a flat nub being applied to the bucking to give it an even flatness over the bb so that there is no one point that has more pressure on the bb. 

Then there is the r-hop, r-hop or round hop is a piece of rubber that is fitted over the window in the barrel and seamless with the outside of it as well as with the inside. It's essentially filling in the window as if it was never there but its rubber and not metal. This applies a more even spread of hopup going down nearly half way and has contact on all parts of the upper half of the bb. This is more consistent and so creates better accuracy.

The downside to an r-hop is it has to be very very precise, meaning that each rubber piece is fitted to the inner barrel and cannot be just bought and slapped on any old barrel. Which means either you do it yourself or you pay someone to do it for you, which is very expensive, costing anywhere from $40-150 depending on the length of the barrel.

Another way of creating consistency is to create a consistent air seal. Meaning the same amount of air is coming out every single time. One way of doing this is putting silicone lubricant on the o-rings inside the gearbox. This makes them puff out more which makes a tighter fit allowing no air to escape. Another way is to replace the parts creating the air seal with better quality stuff and dual o-rings making it nearly impossible for air to escape.

For the most part, airsoft guns are very similar in their function, there is a gearbox inside the base of the gun that compresses air and releases it firing the bb forward.

There are 4 separate gears that travel from the motor to the piston which allows air to flow through the nozzle propelling the bb forward. The motor head has a small pinion gear that interacts with the bevel gear which interacts with the spur gear which interacts with the sector gear that pulls the piston back and springs forward which compresses air and releases that through the air nozzle at the top right of the gearbox. 

The air is compressed by a piston with a rubber seal being pulled back by the sector gear then shot forward by the spring. By replacing the spring you can increase or decrease the fps (feet per second) of the bbs. The stronger the spring is the faster the bb will travel. 

Once the initial schematic design is complete you can go through and add textures and fixings to fill up space and detect the rooms that need modifying and adjustments.

Do not spend too much time modeling the kitchen, the objective is to create a simple simulation of how the kitchen would be played out not every detail like trim, hinges, and knobs.

You want it simple so you can make fast changes as you go over the design with your client.

Use simple boxes to represent drawers and cupboards and subdivide them with horizontal lines to separate them from each other. The counter is done slightly differently, create a group aside from the rest of the rest of the kitchen unit and make it one object and paint it with the countertop texture of your choosing.

It's important to include these things to represent the furniture needed to fill each space and the flow of the house. The furniture should not be things you are modeling manually. Just grab them from the SketchUp warehouse.

Once your interior is complete for the schematic design phase its now time to focus on the exterior. Namely, the driveway. 

Bring your house model back into the terrain model. Next, create a plane large enough to cover the front of the house where the driveway will be located. Then intersect it with the house model to create the outline that you can work off of.

Next, hide your house model and change your perspective view to parallel perspective and look from the top viewport. Disable any layers that aren't necessary for this phase such as building setbacks etc. Make sure your main road, terrain contour lines and obstructions such as tree locations and large boulders. As well as hiding the terrain model or make it 2D.

Then, using the line tools you can begin to model the driveway, keep in mind the location of where it is located in tandem with the terrain contours. Meaning, find a spot that has a lower slope. Once you are fished modeling it save a copyright before you drape it on the terrain. 

Next, select the driveway and enable the terrain model and drape the driveway upon the terrain. Texture it beforehand if necessary