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Thank you. This is actually
quite an honor.
I'm Julia Lankin of the Fast
Car Project.
I have been basically
3D casting aluminum here
for the last six months or so.
And it's been an interesting
process.
I actually
have a background as a software engineer,
not anything, not really anything
resembling hardware.
Normally I've been
developing all kinds of things around
the Linux kernel and some
work, but I
recently got a bad case
of carpal tunnel, so I kind of had to
ditch the software career for something a
little more, a little less repetitive
stress.
I've been building 3-D printers over
the last three years, so I decided that
it would be a good idea to
kind of push that technology a bit
forward.
I've been I've been looking at
the situation we have with proprietary
hardware in the automotive industry for a
while and
decided basically that it
was it was time for us to have something
a little more solid as far as
an option for
repairing our own vehicles.
Where I come from, having a
not having a vehicle means not having a
job, not being able to get to medical
event, you know, basically not being able
to have a lifestyle.
When I started on the
aluminum printing sort of quest
here, it was, of course, to to
print up some durable components
for the vehicles that I'm trying
to produce.
I've been basically working on the
entire chain from the design
tool of implicit can all the
way down to actually cast
in the aluminum itself.
The four
for the automobiles computing system
itself. We've been looking at using as
many free and open tools as well
to make sure that we can actually trust
the machinery that we're driving around
now.
Currently the the state of the art
for if you want to take a piece
of plastic and convert it into a piece of
aluminum is called it's the
lost play technique, which is
to say that you lose play
plastic whenever you're producing
the part, you put the part inside of a
mold that is made out of sand and made
out of plaster of Paris.
Then you let the mold set up
after attaching kind of an inlet,
an outlet for the aluminum in the mold.
And then you put it into a propane
fired for you wait for
roughly about five hours for the plastic
to actually burn and for all of your
inlets and outlets to burn out.
And then you wait for it to cool.
You take this and
put it into basically a box full of sand
with a little bit of extensions on it to
let the aluminum flow into it.
And then you pour in liquid aluminum.
It's a time consuming process that
requires people who have a lot
of experience dealing with basically
blacksmith type tools for
it's roughly twenty four hours to get a
part out of it.
So what I've been what I've been looking
at is, of course, with a 24
hour delay, it's hard to have any sort of
turn around and the
results are not necessarily guaranteed.
I mean, I've been having roughly
a basically one in
three success rate out of my process
here.
And that has to do more with the
pieces that are in common with with lost
plays than anything that anything
I've been managing.
You have to sit there and burn propane
for most of the day, which is a whole
lot of energy.
And we have
in practicing this sort of a technique,
we've actually run into several
accidental fires.
So sort of
not to burn oneself down is important.
When I was looking around at ways to
actually impart energy into the vessel,
I was thinking, you know.
Microwaves are very good at getting
into a surface and getting
to a target.
So I started this process,
you know, looking at 3D printers and
thinking, well, why don't I just make an
aluminum extruder to actually
extrude aluminum?
Well, after about a year
and a half of working on it, it turned
out that the the method
I was going down required me to use
diamond like carbon deposition
technologies, which I don't even have.
So I
ended up scratching that after quite a
while of work.
So I looked at the lost play techniques
and decided that these are
reasonable techniques.
But all of this propane is probably
a bad idea to be doing in any sort of a
residential zone.
So at that point
I started I started looking around on
YouTube and all your various video
sites and saw at least
roughly 15 people who claimed
to have microwaved aluminum to the point
at which it was melt. It was actually
liquid.
Now, some of those I found
use like woods metal or used
other lower temperature metals and then
said, hey, you can do metal in the
microwave.
But, you know, aluminum is hard.
Now, I went ahead and
built a forge
kind of inspired off of the designs
that they were using to melt
down my aluminum.
But then I figured, well,
I can melt aluminum in the microwave, but
what do I do about this mold technique?
Because I still have to have an empty
mold to pour the aluminum into
in order for in order to produce parts.
So we went
ahead and created
a mold process,
but we were still having some real
trouble with the microwave forge.
I've only gotten it to work a limited
number of times and have blown
smoking holes in at least one microwave.
And so.
We went ahead and set up this small
the small propane fired for
that I found directions for on
Instructables, which is basically
the size of a large coffee can a lot
more a lot easier to have
lying around and a lot more
a lot more space sensitive.
So we started working with that one
so that we could get liquid aluminum for
our for our molding process and start
actually developing our molding process.
This is what the microwave forbes'
that I created the first time looks like
this one here actually worked.
So it's basically a
mixture of fire, cement
and perlite.
So silicon,
oh, not silicon carbide, but another
silicon substance and
basically a gardening supply perlite.
In order to produce it, it's
a large, complicated process.
So my my apologies if I skip through
some of this, this is still something
that is a little bit on the
better level, because we've
only we've only managed to get this to
work a couple of times.
And I've produced almost as
many forges trying to make this make
designs work as I have
gotten cups full of aluminum.
So basically, the entire
concept is you make yourself a
vessel for holding a lot of heat
and then you put on the inside of this
vessel some silicon carbide
grinding powder. And you see over there
in the consumables, that's a
that is a microwave scepter,
which is to say that it's a material that
when it receives microwaves, it
actually heats up rapidly
and will just conduct
this heat outward without going into a
liquid or gaseous stage.
So it just gets warm and you
can just dump lots and lots of microwaves
at.
So, like I said, we're using fire,
cement and perlite for
the vessel itself,
which we end up having to make in
multiple, multiple kind of ways,
we make the inside of the chamber first,
then we make the outside of the chamber,
then a seal on the top of it and then a
lid to go down onto the seal.
We have to use an oven to actually
cook all of this fire cement until such
a point as it's actually solid
because it comes just as a sort of
a putty.
And we we mix that with the perlite
and kind of construct our vessel from
there.
The inside layer we
end up putting together by using a car,
sort of making our own cardboard box and
then sort of smearing the stuff around
the cardboard box, the box
has to be roughly the size of
the vessel, which in this case is a steel
cup that we're going to melt the aluminum
in.
So we don't allow the aluminum to touch
the actual silicon carbide or box
itself that we have something to pick it
up out of the box with.
The outside layers would basically just
make the thing as thick as possible
that will still fit in a microwave.
We do have to make sure that the
microwave itself has the,
you know, the little turning table in the
bottom of the microwave.
We take that out so that the kiln is not
sitting there spinning and we can
actually make it rectangular instead of
round.
The seal and
the lid were actually a pretty
complicated process because you want to
get a very tight seal on the top
of this thing.
So we made as flat
of a seal as possible by hand.
And then once we had
that done, we kind of just
took and made as close as we
could to a flat lid, let it
heat up for a little while in the oven,
and then put the entire chamber
on top of it as sort of both a weight
and a guide to make it form
into exactly the same shape.
Once we have the chamber itself made
and we have lived, we basically
just take the microwave scepter
and we mix it with sugar
and water and just basically
paint it on the inside of the
of the vessel.
So the sugar
serves the function of holding all
of the silicon carbide
in place, because when you burn sugar,
you get pure carbon, which sets
up very nicely with the silicon carbide.
So it kind of just makes all the
all the silicon carbide stay on the
wall exactly where you paint it.
I used the oven to
apply the first layer and
after you've got the first layer of your
silicon carbide applied,
then you can actually just use the
microwave for applying the rest of the
layers because of course, the silicon
carbide is just going to get hot.
So that was very convenient
because your first baking something
in the oven for an hour and then you put
it in the microwave and it takes five
minutes.
This here is one of our proof of concept,
Maltz, this is the first time I
successfully got aluminum to
melt in my microwave.
It took me basically two
hours and 40 minutes, set
it high.
And when I went
to take it out of the microwave, I had
to, of course, use fire gloves and
keep this microwave outside, insert
the standard, never use a microwave
that you're going to use for any other
purpose and don't do this kind of stuff
indoors. Liquid aluminum is not good for
your floors.
So once the aluminum actually
liquefied, I didn't have myself
a mold prepared at the time.
I honestly didn't expect it to work after
the third kiln that I had built.
And it's like, OK, I have a couple of
liquid aluminum. What do I do with it?
Nothing.
OK, so.
So I just let it cool
in the cup. Now aluminum, when it's
cooling, actually contracts by
about three percent.
So as a result it just kind of pulled
right out of the cup because it didn't
bind to the edges.
The cup is made of steel.
The aluminum is obviously made of
aluminum and aluminum oxide.
So it did
not bind at all.
I just pulled it kind of right out of the
cup. That is actually a
steel cup that I picked up for one
dollar at a thrift store.
That's your high tech
crucible here.
Now, when we went to make our
small propane forge, basically
based on the Instructables link.
We set up and
we built a bigger one, honestly, because
we wanted to we wanted this process to
really kick out aluminum as fast
as possible so we didn't increase the
size of the crucible,
the vessel that we actually hold the
aluminum in. Instead, we we
went outward on the size of
the forge itself.
So that is a standard
milk crate you see there.
And that is the size of the forages that
we're making. So we basically just build
one that's, you know, roughly
13 inches on each side.
Once we've got the forge up and running,
this is what this is what it actually
looks like after running for quite
a long time and putting out a whole lot
of aluminum.
This one here has as you can see, there
are cracks in the top of it.
These do break down over time.
But we we've gotten roughly
40 or 50 melts out of each one of
them that we're producing.
So as you can see, we've got a
chamber there full of aluminum.
They there's a set of basically steel
tongs that we put around the
crucible that we hold the aluminum in.
So it's always they're always part
of one unit. So you can pick it up, of
course, again with fire gloves,
not your bare hands.
So you can pick up the so you
can pick up the crucible out of the
chamber and
pour your aluminum.
We we use the chambers
themselves are made out of are the
crucibles themselves are made out
of old propane.
Can propane bottles, the small
ones make sure that they're empty before
you go cutting them in half?
The the advantage of using
that, other than the fact that it's a
standard size, is it's also solid
steel and that steel
binds to the aluminum oxide
whenever you're melting down aluminum,
what we're what we're actually doing for
our aluminum source is we're actually
using old bicycle rims because we can get
them for free.
So free aluminum, hard to
argue with.
And it comes with some impurities
on the outside of it because it's
obviously been through its entire life
cycle and then been warped and then then
what have you.
So the aluminum oxide
that is that coats, all the aluminum
that you see has to go somewhere.
So it sticks to the sides of
this chamber because this chamber is
made of steel and apparently it sticks to
the carbon in the steel.
So that way you get a nice clean
pour of pure aluminum out of
out of this method.
We're also using a stirring rod for it
that's made of steel so that any of the
any aluminum oxide that it happens to
come into contact with also binds
the starring Rod.
We've got a burner there,
we've used basically burners that
we've picked up at our local hardware
store and those have worked
out fine, but over time they kind
of get expensive to go through because
one of them lasts like twenty, twenty
five burns.
And then something goes wrong with the
end and you've got to go get another one.
And they're not exactly cheap,
like 40 bucks or so.
So we went and found another
Instructables for a homebuilt
burner. That is what you see in the
picture here.
It's actually much solider
construction. So we don't end up
we haven't had any problems with it
whatsoever.
We're using basically the giant
sized propane tanks.
So you can see our line to the propane
tank there. And we're using a regulator
directly attached to the propane tank to
control the to control the heat
level and our burner.
Now for the microwave molds themselves,
this is actually where
this is actually the exciting part of it
to me.
The microwave molds itself.
You have to make up this investment,
which is basically just a group of
water and perlite
and plaster of Paris.
You then take your you
then take your 3D printed object.
You attach a series of spruce
and inlets and
you attach basically where your aluminum
goes in and where your aluminum goes out.
And then you put it into a piece of
Tupperware that is very,
very cheap and flexible because you want
to be able to just pop this out.
Don't use the solid stuff, use the
in my case, the dollar store stuff.
It works out very well.
And you can just kind of pop the
pop the whole
combination of your 3D printed
object in your investment material right
out of the Tupperware works great.
This here is one of the 3D printed
objects being set up.
This is actually one that I've got here
on the table as well.
So you can see the result.
The Styrofoam there is for your
inlet and outlet channels.
So the Styrofoam
on the right hand side
is where we're going to be pouring in
aluminum. And the Styrofoam on the left
hand side is kind of where air goes out.
As you can see, we attach where we're
pouring in a little bit more to the
object than the outside
because we want a little bit of pressure
at the object to make sure that the
aluminum adheres to every contour
of the the
of the of the negative.
So you end up with literally every ridge
of your original 3D printed object
visible in the aluminum result.
To like like I said earlier,
we're using as a scepter and we also use
this the scepter in the microwaving
process for our 3D printed
parts. So the 3D printed
parts, we basically take what you saw on
the last slide and we
just kind of make this spray here
out of, again, the scepter,
powder, sugar,
water and a little bit of alcohol to get
to beat up.
And we kind of just spray the
surface five or six times, letting it
dry in between so that we get
a microwave scepter right
there at the 3D printed object.
What this does is it allows us to
basically use the mold since the
mold is transparent to microwaves, the
energy for the microwave, it actually
goes directly to the 3D printed
object and all of its guides and screws
and skips up the whole process of having
to having to heat up this
item that is made necessarily
out of highly heat resistant
substances.
So as a result,
it cuts down the time considerably.
We're looking at roughly two hours
between the time in which we have a 3D
printed part in our hand and the time at
which we've got a mold in the microwave
versus know the our approach
of the standard lost play.
So there's six hours of your life back
and probably a little bit a little bit
cheaper life insurance because you don't
have to use propane for the step.
This is one of the molds, actually,
this might this might even be that mold,
I don't quite I don't quite remember
which one it is in the microwave
actually being microwaved out.
So we wait just long
enough for the mold
material to harden.
Then we pop it out of the
of the Tupperware container that we used
and put it in the microwave and
basically microwave it until we can get
all the water to leave the mold.
Normally you have to normally with
lost play, you basically got to leave
this thing sitting around long enough for
it to get solid, which sometimes can
be days depending on the size of your
size of your mold.
And in our case, we just
completely cheat.
We throw it in the microwave, we nuke it
until the water is gone.
Now, as is doing this,
we have to microwave it on low
because you don't want to basically
cause air bubbles that are inside of it
to expand from steam.
And we actually had a lot
of molds for a while that were exploding
on us because we didn't know we didn't
know what was going on with it.
The the air bubbles were collecting
all the steam, too much pressure on the
inside of it. And you're just kind of
sitting there and you hear a boom out of
the microwave and all you've got is a
mess.
So what also happens
is that the water that is exiting the
object will try to beat
up on the surface.
So basically, your microwave tries
to flood.
You have to get in there with a towel and
about every 15 minutes to
it out and remove all the water
that you can find.
We did kill at least one microwave by
flooding.
Once you have your mold all
once your plastic has actually burned out
of the mold, then you're
ready to pour in your aluminum.
Now, in order to get your plastic to burn
out, of course, it takes it takes a
little while to burn the plastic as well.
You're looking at about an hour on
about an hour on simple objects
to burn the plastic.
And the the real way you can tell
that you're done burning plastic, of
course, because you can't look inside of
the mold is you kind of
microwave it until such a point is
you can see smoke leaving
the microwave, but you
try not to microwave it much more than
that because you want to make sure that
you don't overheat the mold itself.
If you put too much energy into it,
the mold itself will try to burn.
And at the at the point at which your
mold burns, you're pretty much done.
So you kind of microwave it just
it just at the right point.
This, of course, varies per machine.
I have found no no
universal methods when it comes to
what settings should be for what
microwaves.
So it's very trial and error.
Expect your first couple of parts just to
die.
Now, once you have a mold in your hands,
you've got to put these screw extenders,
which is which are those two Red Bull
cans that you see there?
Those are for the inlets in the outlets
for the aluminum.
So we basically bury
that in a box of sand and
get the sand all the way up to the top
of it that we whenever we pour in our
aluminum, the sand kind of just
holds everything in place because
those Red Bull cans do not put up to a
liquid aluminum very long.
So.
This is us actually using
our Little Forge
to pour aluminum into the
mold that you just saw.
So this is this is what
it looks like in production.
You've got a vessel full of aluminum
that you have superheated, which is to
say that you've brought to at least eight
hundred degrees Celsius
with standard propane and
then you kind of just pour it into your
microwaved mold.
This is this is what I consider our
temporary hybrid approach, because
the little forage well, the little us to
get the job done as far as melting
aluminum.
But it's nowhere near big enough for you
to put any 3D printed objects
and molds and do any of the cooking that
you normally would for standard lost
play. So this gives you
roughly just enough
hardware in a small space
that you can get this process done.
As you can see, the there's
usually a little bit of plastic residue
still left on the inside, but you want to
make sure there's as little as possible
and still in your mold
and it does catch fire.
And in addition, so does the
paint on the Red Bull cans.
So does the duct tape.
So does that. But none of this matters
because at that point, you've got your
aluminum in the right place and.
Once you're done, you end up with this,
you know, mold that has been
well, it's had aluminum poured and you've
got to kind of just break it apart and
then you get it kind of like unwrapping
Christmas presents.
You get whatever you've got on the
inside. You're like, oh, is this really?
Oh, really?
It's kind of nice.
As I was saying earlier, the the
combination of using a small
propane fired forge
and using using
a microwave for your molding techniques
means that you get to get to
rapidly do this process.
I have periods
of about four to five hours gone from 3D
printed thing to waiting
for my aluminum to cool versus
the standard process, which sometimes can
take days depending on how thick
your mold is and.
So this here is actually one of our
first good successes, it's my
3D printer printing more 3-D printers,
which seems to be all I do with my 3D
printer.
Well, I have been building them for three
years, I have I
don't know what it is, but all I see is
more printer parts. Every time I try, you
know, every time I try printing
something. So I reprinted
my machine over again.
Of course, most people with a process
style machine are going to reprint their
machine to get better parts.
Well, I reprinted my machine
partially to get aluminum parts,
so it made a very good practical
application.
Now, when you're printing a plastic
part, you can, of course, get away with
having basically almost no infill
because, well, you don't have to worry
about how solid the part is.
You just have to make sure that it will
hold liquid from being inside
of it. That's a pretty low bar.
You're you also print the parts
at one hundred and three percent because
as I was saying earlier, aluminum
contracts just a little bit.
So you basically just hit your stretch
in whatever particular program you're
using to print and stretch it up to a
hundred and three percent, then hit
print. That's really all you have to know
about printing the plastic at a time.
It actually means that your plastic parts
will print pretty quickly, too, because,
I mean, I know I have spent four hours
trying to print a solid extruder before
and when I can spend an hour and a
half printing a solid extruder and then
turn it into a piece of aluminum in four
hours. That's that to me is
a much nicer scenario.
These are this is me attempting
to print extruders out of my machine,
that's still a little that's still a
little bit too large for our process
right now.
As you can see, the the one
on the right has most of its components
intact. But you see the
you see the inlets in the outlets for the
aluminum there.
I put them way too thick
and way too attached.
And one thing to note about this aluminum
that comes out is it's actually,
in my experience, harder and
solid or the most aluminum that you deal
with.
And so as a result,
well, as a result, it's very
difficult to pull away from the
extrusion, to pull away from the object
itself, the one on the left.
I actually left a little bit of space
so that I could try to cut it off.
This is a suspension component
for kind of this little
RC car type thing that we were trying
to produce, it did not turn
out well because we casted it.
And instead of using sand, we use
vermiculite, which is a really, really
bad idea. Don't do that.
It's too light.
As I said, we've been working with
Implicit CAD, which is a
CAD application for designing
our parts. We like parametric parts.
So when designing, you know,
when trying to design a series of car
parts, we want to make sure everything
lines up so we're using a
functional based language to actually
design components.
We had some people trying to get
us to three d print their objects, of
course, using using
various non free software like
AutoCAD, for instance.
It just it just doesn't have what we need
it.
Implicit cad is our it's
our language of choice, and we kind of
just use it to compile a design from
a solid piece.
Well, from a just a plain
text file all the way into an STL file
for printing.
This is kind of what some of the examples
in the language look like, so
in order to implement like a test suite
in it, we basically took
and.
Well, we basically designed the same
component as many different ways as we
could in the language so that we could
compare the modified some of the styles.
Designing things like a gear, and it was
a reasonably difficult
I had to learn trigonometry to do this,
which was not easy for me at all
because I'm I'm actually natively
a C programmer. So all of this all
this 3D design, all this aluminum
pouring, it's it was it was not
necessarily my forte, but I had to get
away from a keyboard.
The language allows for some
severely rounded objects.
That's why we've labeled these all
unicorns, because I don't even know how
to do this and many other languages,
but it's like the object on the right.
It's kind of twisted as it goes upward,
which is a function on an extrude
of a.
Yeah, I can't I can almost not
even explain it myself, but it works out
very well.
We ended up having a whole lot of
issues with the software because it had
been abandoned for about a year,
and any time something's abandoned like
that, you end up with that rot.
So we ended
up throwing at a test suite on it
and basically taking over the
project with the original maintainers
blessing.
This is that
I still don't quite know what this
is, to be honest, it was trying
to be a gear just like the gears earlier,
but I passed in the wrong value to the
wrong function, and I don't think that's
five teeth anymore.
As I was saying, the software ends up
with some interesting bugs.
So this is attempting to be one of those
disks that I was showing earlier,
but it multidimensional scale
function was just kind of broken.
So it's an overall mix.
It makes sense when you know the code,
but when
we're comparing the files, it
sticks out like a sore thumb.
So we get to run tests of each individual
section of language.
The the fuzz in the middle of that,
I still don't quite know what's causing
that.
That, again, is another attempt to be a
disc with a hole in the middle.
No.
So.
So this here is an attempt to be a gear,
it has five teeth, the five
teeth are technically around
it, but
that's about all you can say for this
one. The five teeth are if
you actually break out the measuring
stick, they're not even actually evenly
spaced in addition to the one being,
you know, and that is not space
for a six one on the other side.
If you measure it, it's not there.
It's like, you know, it would need six
and a half teeth for this.
This was a regression in the language,
which is to say that at
some point in the language, this exact
code worked. I can give you a get
revision. I swear it did work, but
then somebody changed something.
And this is currently the result.
We've been we've been working with
implicit cattle here for about three
months now, so I've been sort of
just tearing apart the language, which
works out pretty well for me.
I mean, it's all functional,
just straight math.
And it's based on Haskell,
which I'm starting to enjoy, even
though I really don't understand at least
half of it.
But the nice part for me is
as a software developer, I kind of
I kind of got my start start
pretty early working on Ray Tracer's,
which is some complicated
math, but it's something that I got very
comfortable with at an early age.
And this engine kind of uses a tracer
on the inside of it in order to
produce in order to decide where the
triangles go.
This is a powder.
This is one of the more complicated
things I've been producing.
I think I may has some of the most
complicated, implicit CAD files ever at
this point.
Some like, you know, nine hundred lines
of just object description.
So this here is basically
a ring around a
track mold where we're making
these very flexible tracks
for a series of for a series
of basically RC cars.
So they have kind of little bitty tank
trends that are, you know, that can
climb, for instance, the steps up to the
stairs. So this is kind of the outside
of that track system.
This is an attempt to be the track
itself.
As you can probably see, there's still
a little bit of gaps in some of those
teeth, which I don't quite
I still don't quite understand.
There's a couple of bugs still in the
implicit CAD system that I'm ferreting
out.
The same thing is kind of holding here.
As you can tell, this is kind of trying
to be the inside of that mold.
But see all the little threads
that are sort of standing up there,
I don't quite know what's going on with
that either. A union of a union, of a
circle of a something of that sort.
Now, the reason that we actually did this
all was to
was to try to have aluminum parts for
our automotive process so
that that was actually why I started down
the path of aluminum printing even before
my even before my hands started to give
me any sort of difficulties.
I was I was trying to build a
aluminum extruder for quite a long time
and just kind of had to throw my hands up
at it.
We're we're looking at this is basically
two layers, which is to say that the
first thing that we're trying to produce
is we're calling it Allen,
which is a attempt to
put put parts on
people's currently existing vehicles, let
them maintain it longer, let them add
whatever sort of flares they want to the
vehicle. For instance, one thing
that I walked outside and immediately
noticed about my cars was
no folding mirrors.
You know, folding mirrors are kind of
nice, but it just was not
an option in that year model.
And there's just nothing I can do that
other than try to 3D print
the whole process.
When we're trying to build up replacement
parts for these cars, we've, of course,
got to completely reconsider
how security is working.
So in our current in
our current automobiles.
Well, the newer ones are a security
nightmare and the older ones just don't
have all the features that we're used to
liking. So it's
like, how many of these talks have you
been to or how many of these have you
seen where somebody is owning
the car of the week and showing you how
you can slam on the brakes or how you can
hold down the accelerator or
lock everyone in the vehicle?
The computing security in a car is
a nightmare because from my perspective,
we tend to treat car computing more
like a wireless router than we do a
hospital.
But wireless routers, when they crash,
no one dies, cars when they crash.
Well, a hospital is
involved one way or another.
We've been trying to
trying to design the internal
network of it, sort of in a segmented
off system so that
so that if somebody ends up owning your
CD player, your CD player isn't able to
tell your brakes, hey, come on now.
It's having this sort of separation
makes some good sense.
We're we're, of course, doing this from
a we're looking
at this sort of as the blue team approach
versus your red team approach for your
current cars.
Most people most people who are working
in car security right now are working
in the ability to break into
them, not necessarily in the ability
to actually build them up from the
ground.
So we're trying to build them up sort of
in a from scratch situation.
We're licensing everything as
freely as possible and
as freely as we can even consider, so
we've done a lot of research into
hardware licensing and had to had
to figure the I think
that the Taproom L.
is currently as as
open as it gets at the moment, but
it's kind of an attempt to be the GPL
in the hardware world.
And of course, we're using
version three for all of our software
designs and all the software that we're
using.
We've got a canaria on our site.
So if we end up with any sort of
a you know, we can't talk about
whatever letter we just received type of
scenario, you can at least tell that
we're not talking about it and not
updating our Canaria date.
And so you can tell if we've
received our you know, you must implant
this chip to all cars.
Notice we are talking,
of course, out of the United States.
So minor concern.
And as I was saying earlier, we're trying
to segment all the networks, this
includes having deciding
what direction data data must communicate
and data must not communicate.
So we're basically
trying to limit it as much as
possible inside as
much communication inside of the vehicle
as possible.
Now, at the end of this, we end up with
basically your garage being
a being what
what I think my father would have
referred to as, you know, a garage back
in the 60s where people actually tooled
with their cars, improved their cars,
played with played with it and
manufactured small components
of it on their own. Nowadays, there's no
such creature. Do you have a do you have
a plastic mold in your garage?
I mean, none of this is acceptable,
but back whenever cars were made of steel
or made of more durable materials.
That was a possibility.
Now, of course, there
are a couple of problems with trying
to manufacture these things, which
is we've got a lot of federal standards
and federal standards involved, which
seems to be our biggest, biggest
issue.
And there's a whole lot
of communication occurring in modern
cars that we're trying to eliminate.
So we're trying to make this
something where you can do all of this
work yourself.
Well, that didn't format, right?
This is what you get for compiling your
presentation on the stage.
As you can tell, we're looking for
as much help as we can.
So if you would get
me an email, contact me on Diaspora.
And when you're emailing, try to
try to online wrap that PGP
fingerprint.
Thank you kindly.
We will have a small Q&A session,
please line up the microphones throughout
the audience and we will
call you out.
Please ask questions.
OK, microphone three.
All right, but
hi.
Um, the the
intersecting face problem that you were
showing in some of your renderings, I
think that's actually a map.
That's a result of the math library as
well. Lack of precision.
You're getting very close to the surface.
I've seen this in other 3D modeling where
if you you get like just
exploding geometry nans
all over the place.
And if that if you shift the camera by
even like a tenth
of a degree, suddenly things start to
resolve. It's because you're just
there. Your position is not high enough
in open. Eskild, where I've run into this
problem before I get around it by just
adding like another tenth
of a millimeter to my model and it
pokes through successfully and you
get the actual hole that you're looking
for.
Yeah, that's that's absolutely
correct.
And kind of since I'm maintaining
implicit CAD, I have sort of not fixed
my model in that fashion intentionally
to remind me that this
sort of above exists so that I can
get the math to come out exactly right.
The the little threads and Neel's there
as a 3D print.
That object, of course, those are just
going to fall off anyway.
So I did have a quick question.
I missed the slide that
it looks implicit.
Cat looks a lot like open cat.
It does. Was is it a fork or
is it inspired or is it just
Haskell versus whatever
the contrived language they're using?
It is kind of inspired by, which
is to say that implicit
cat uses what's called s CAD
as its language. So it should be CAD,
but it's being interpreted functionally
and the semantics are a little bit
different. So
it is a derivative of
the language, but the code bases are
completely different.
OK, so this is a new original thing that
I should go check out then.
Thank you.
I have another question for.
Hello.
OK.
You mentioned silicone covid a lot.
Would it be suitable to use only
Copple for the same
purpose?
Actually, not at all.
What's what's going on there is in
a microwave, whenever you're actually
microwaving any material,
the microwave energy is being
is being absorbed because it's a
it's an electromagnetic vibration and
you need a molecule in there
that is not symmetrical.
And the silicon carbide is
kind of just a little bit off.
If you got pure carbon, then even
carbon, even carbon chains,
they don't vibrate so they don't heat up
at all.
Microphone sorry,
you had a problem.
This was tripped up by this
in your place of
off with the exploding bolts.
Did you try it
investigating the
mixing methods for
the Crystal Palace used for making
porcelain molds, because
you can mix your place very
well with this
in the first place.
Um, part of the problem there is
the perlite substance itself
basically is almost an air bubble
that is trapped inside of a
mineral.
So perlite is just very spongy
mineral that we're just kind of all
throwing in our gardens.
And there's not that much of it,
unfortunately.
But as a result, there are always
air bubbles because we use the we use the
perlite sort of space it out
because the plaster of Paris will
not only will it absorb microwaves
just slightly, but in addition,
plaster of Paris is not enough to stand
up to liquid aluminum.
The plaster of Paris gets burned
just a hair every time.
So there is actually just a little bit of
burned plaster of Paris on the inside of
the mold, the perlite kind of, you know,
spaces things out so that you have that
insulating effect.
And one question, did you
try having could cast
aluminum parts in your furnace?
I have not I'm
not even familiar with the process,
actually.
Microphone for thank you for the
great talk.
Thank you. Prove my
interest is in psychonauts, which is
hucking of the human consciousness.
And you talked about biohacking being
a long term goal to expand
on that.
Well, actually, part of the reason that
I've been trying to trying
to build 3-D printers in the first place,
I'm previously from the medical
records industry, so I've
always been trying to kind of advance our
medical industry in one fashion or
another. But in this case, I've been
looking at my 3D printer and going, how
do I use that?
Well, the precision is not there in a
plastic 3-D printer.
Everything is wiggling around.
No matter how no matter how you handle
it, you're looking at one hundred microns
of precision, which is just horrible
whenever you're trying to produce any
sort of biological material.
So I looked at that and went,
how do I improve the quality of the
printer?
And so I decided solid alone parts
would probably increase that quality to
such a point that we can print and find
enough detail to start actually attacking
real bioprinting problems.
And do you have a plan on when you when
you start to work on this after
my first car is off the line.
Best of luck. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Microphone three, thank you very
much for the very cool talk.
I just want to ask a question.
Have you considered
the other way a removal
methods such as, you know, is
like CMC or something?
Lots of lots of mimic.
What's the what's the advantage?
Disadvantage of the advantages
while getting a hold of large chunks of
aluminum is expensive.
I mean, and this way I'm literally
just taking I'm literally recycling old
bicycle rims that I'm getting for free
here.
So it's a lot it's
a lot more it's a lot cheaper that way.
Right.
OK, but but it would still work.
Like if you sort of
whenever you're doing that kind of work,
you end up having to have three or
four or five access machines
to get the sort of, you know, angle on
the inside of the angles upward in
the hole on the middle of the.
Yeah, for and 3D printing really just
gets around all that problem for you
already.
All right.
Thanks, Michael, for
things and everything.
I just have one question with respect to
your finances, I actually have absolutely
no idea. But a friend of mine used
induction heating to to my
aluminum or whatever.
And have you looked into that?
Because that looked really impressive,
what that guy did. And he was like
fifteen at that time.
He probably shouldn't have done that in
his own house. But
again, he a liquid aluminum indoor.
There's a rule for that in my house, I've
only broken it once,
so he seemed to be able to melt the
amounts of aluminum that you are showing,
liking him in a matter of three minutes
or so.
Induction heating does work,
but at least the one unit that
I have seen that has been documented
for this purpose, it takes two
hundred and forty volts, which is not
even available in the house that I'm in.
So just just to start with, it's
consuming a lot of energy now.
A microwave consumes a lot of energy to
fifteen hundred watts times, you know,
two hours.
But at the rate at which I'm getting
that, it's roughly twenty five cents
an hour.
So pretty cheap.
We may have two questions left.
So microphone to
all of those things for this morning.
Talk show,
calculator to your energy
source.
Have you calculated your energy costs
because it's nice to do such
stuff. Do it. Just do it yourself.
But I think
aluminum industry and heavy metal
industry is one of the most power
consuming industries in the world.
So how can we scale that energy
consumption don't.
Actually, that was part of the part
of the win from my perspective, because
by taking eight hours of propane
and converting it into two hours of
electricity, well, one, it's a lot easier
to produce.
It's a lot easier to produce electricity
via actually useful
actually carbon neutral means
and in another form for
another part of it.
Basically, I'm getting my energy at
twenty five cents for
twenty five cents per microwave per hour,
which is probably the first time that
unions has ever been used
and the
as a result of that.
Being able to microwave
down these rims,
being able to melt down currently
existing aluminum into new shapes
gives us a lot lower power
consumption than the manufacture of the
stuff. And in my case, I'm literally
keeping aluminum from going straight into
the straight into the landfill.
So even even my failures of
parts turn out to be
I can throw them back in.
I don't have to consume all the energy it
takes to actually separate aluminum from
bauxite. That's actually your real
high energy consumption.
So. Ninety five percent of the energy
that is being wasted was wasted
in the production, changing it from one
aluminum shape to another.
Aluminum shape is actually a really
low energy cost, comparatively.
OK, microphone three,
you mentioned using the steel tanks, but
did you do you actually need any sort of
additional flux or anything to
work with aluminum like this?
Actually, not at all.
It worked out, worked out quite
excellently.
They still holds onto
the aluminum, basically to the
aluminum oxide, just kind of bong's right
there at the edges. So after
those steel tanks only lasts about three
or four prints.
And by the time you're done, you've got
about two or three centimeters worth
of aluminum oxide just all over
the edges of the tank.
And it doesn't have as much volume to
begin with anyway.
So no flexes involved?
No.
The most complicated part of that is when
you're trying to heat up your first
little speck of aluminum, make it a
little speck of aluminum, because, of
course, aluminum conducts heat very well,
even even in its liquid state.
So if you're trying to heat up a large
block of aluminum in your forge, you've
really got to throw in an itty bitty
piece to get liquid first
and then start feeding in bigger and
bigger pieces.
We actually start with a piece of our Red
Bull cans as a
as part of the starter.
OK, we just
try to make the camera work here
and you may show us some of your
work here.
Last last chance,
please, please,
please.
Something happened. Yeah.
Actually, I have one photo that was in
the slides, but
that doesn't show you the
OK.
Yeah.
OK, let's take.
Can we move
this piece here if
we can actually get it
visible yet for.
No, Zoome.
OK,
OK, there we go.
This is, like I said, one of the as
you can tell, I'm kind of a little bit
addicted to Red Bull sugar free whenever
we're doing this.
So, yeah, lots of runs down
to the local market to pick up Red Bull
cans for our Subaru inlets.
So those are kind of our extenders.
And this is what it looks like when you
get one directly out of
directly out of the process.
So it's like the the only thing
here.
The other component that was interesting
from my perspective is this one here
is the raw chunk of aluminum
that we got out of the
out of our process itself.
This is from the microwave forge.
So I've only seen about
I've honestly only seen about seven or
eight examples online of
people actually getting a microwave
to work for this. So I'm pretty proud of
this one little chunk because it took
a lot of work. This used to be some
Pentium four heat sinks.
Apparently it's not just the Pentium for
this amount.
This here is, of course, the the section
of the the section
of a processed style printer.
This is called the LCS vertex
with foot. If I remember correctly.
It's out on Thingiverse, so.
You can see just some minor defects
in it, if I get the angle just right, you
can see that little crack there.
That's a little air bubble that was in
the in the mold.
Well, in the
that's a section of plastic or
an air or an air bubble that was in the
aluminum when the aluminum went through.
But the part itself is not only
serviceable, I have printed with it on
the machine. So functionality
wins the day there.
So we are right on time.
Thanks to Laura Long-Term and
to your long term, sorry
for the nice talk.
Please take your trash out
and
the next talk will be reproducible.
Build's, thank you kindly.