Making Insanely Cool Projects in a Hidden NYC Machine Shop with Michael Dubno and Richard Garriott!

how he built this what he does down here the combination of machining manufacturing technology code it's checking all the boxes we went down to about 11 000 meters which is the lowest point of the marianas trench richard has been to the iss we also went to the north pole together and jumped into a volcano it goes to 11 it's one louder alexa send michael dubno money hi folks we are here in new york city so you want to introduce yourself so hi i'm mike dubnow uh amateur machinist a professional software developer uh inventor artist explorer basically lunatic i got to know mike a few years ago we met up actually through the tormach facebook group and has since become friends and it's been great to have him to bounce ideas off talk to and the combination of machining manufacturing technology code it's checking all the boxes some of you folks may have seen mike and richard who's over there on a drill press out the bottom of the earth of the ocean literally this is uh my unindicted co-conspirator with almost everything um building stuff uh exploration i probably wouldn't have gone on any of these explorations without richard conning me uh with uh convincing me to do it uh richard has been to the iss a video game developer generally a cool guy i told him once that he used to be my hero we went down to about 11 000 meters which is the lowest point of the marianas trench and the marion's trench is the deepest trench uh in the ocean or on earth we released a geocache that somebody we know made yes do you know anyone who made that amazing vince vince made it thank you vince obviously the geocache and the syntactic foam had to stay outside of your vessel and then a robotic arm that you're controlling with a joystick just drops it richard did the release on his dives okay i went with a guy named victor viscovo richard went with victor viscovo who was the pilot and so you can only have two people it's a four foot nine sphere at best okay and gets a quarter of an inch smaller while while you're going down his dive is the one that deployed it which which makes sense in case you wouldn't deploy sure yeah but also uh richard has another cool cache on the international space station it's amazing the highest and the lowest and when i put it there i was thinking no one is going to go back there to find that yeah but it turns out most every astronaut is either a geocacher or has a friend that is and so that was visited all the time when there's when the logs when people log it i get a message so so this challenge was to make it so they couldn't actually know it was gonna find it but by the way you were mentioning like will people find the plaque and of course they'll see the syntactic foam first but we actually have we the the what we put up on the website is we actually want people to return it if they find it so so so it will all be returned someday hopefully and this machine limiting factor can now go back to that depth regularly in fact it's diving somewhere in the world to basically that depth almost every day now do you guys know the gps coordinates ish gps doesn't work so so the answer is yeah no you don't have gps gps doesn't work after a foot yeah nothing okay yeah but you do try to get pretty good coordinates and i think they're close we also did our pressure experiment which is what john was showing yeah we also did a number of other experiments where we were looking for micro plastics we're looking for extremophiles things that live uh in places where you wouldn't expect anything to be able to live this is air pressure normally at 1100 times that just imagine something trying to to live nothing could really gasify in it etc they have different proteins to do to live and so one of the things that we do is experiment with that and bring back those uh organisms give it to a college to go and analyze it and see what they get well on a much more pedestrian level as a thank you for making the geocache mike sent me a thing and it arrived in the mail and i looked at it what what is this because i sent you what looked like a piece of garbage didn't it correct it was a styrofoam but it was carefully carefully wrapped it was amazing so why don't we start with richard he's working on at the moment our blanks for a semi-computerized oray that we make almost entirely on uh the tormach uh when we're cutting okay you cut all these gears yes so or you filed them like you click yeah click spring um i did this all by hand uh you have to say with an accent that's right chris here good day in fact we should call call chris up instead of making fun of him he's uh an unbelievably good friend but one of the things that uh we realized was useful uh was taking a tormach fourth axis uh micro the micro arc when i got it it did actually didn't even have a name the microarc was um i had the the first beta unit and i figured okay what is it that i can do uniquely with that and it was a cut gears and these specifically are involute cut gears but none of them are cut with an invalid cutter they're cut with standard bevel cutters double bevel cutters uh or slitting saws okay oh interesting yeah i'm thinking just like a 60 degree double angle but you're talking about flat tooling so you actually uh have both of those so let's actually bring up uh so this is missing as planets because this aluminum one is just a test version we wanted to make sure that our idea worked before we spent time making production and so here it is showing current day okay each one of these would hold the planet out at a certain distance and we can change that and travel to 2022 and we say okay look at that and a little stepper motor steps the right amount and if you notice this went back to the same year and now we'll go back to today so i'll put my finger roughly where that was you'll see that a year on yes has transpired we do have uh one of elon musk's uh car the car with with starman in the driver's seat plane it's an interesting orbit it is an eccentric orbit that won't hit earth but it's between like venus uh and mars and it's a weird orbit on an angle designed intentionally not to run into any of these planets oh interesting so it would so it's actually hard to put in an orbit because it actually goes between right the plan is and doesn't go around in a circle yeah and so that'll that'll be horror project number two and so here's uh woodworking stuff we have a shot bot to do things uh water jet cutter in the corner metal storage in the back uh every every place you could stuff something i i sort of have home automation that's monitoring the entire house in real time by the way have you ever seen this saw normally um compound miter saws require a lot of space this one doesn't and why is that look at that joint constrains it on the two different degrees of motion with the articulation there and it's nicely built yeah looks really smooth and can fit in my smallified shop which we're in your basement department for interjecting but one thing you really need to know is how you get all this gear down here oh well that's an interesting question it's not that staircase yeah i heard it well actually worry about jimmy diresta in that staircase so so some did come that way so jimmy helped get the 440 down those stairs but then i got slightly bigger equipment and so we got it down through that access hatch that's street level then close to street level do some electronics work over here even though this looks like a relatively crappy mechanical mechanism this is an atomic clock that i've made hasn't been on in a while but hopefully the processor will boot in time did i show you this before look at that yeah it would be great if it was 12.57 but this is nobody knows that this is the time that was left over in the microcontroller in a few seconds this will actually sync back up to network time and it will hopefully show the right thanks to a time clock oh yeah it's 18 10. see it's perfect you got to see it move what's the processor behind it or the code and oh that's uh i tend to use raspberry pi's they're relatively cheap and really powerful this is just just some of some of the store of stuff did you clean up for this tour no this is incredible like immaculate what's the uh this has benefits and has uh downsides one of the benefits is that you could actually when working here just drill into this as a backing so this is just a sacrificial piece of metal good thing also is you drop things they don't fall on the floor the slightly bad thing is that if you have to vacuum it up this is in the way right if you want to sweep it up but this is where we were doing jewelry uh making and all kinds of other things uh before i feel like i'm showing showing laundry but this is something no this is awesome uh pretty cool in a small shop you want to stuff in as much as possible and so i actually welded together this cart and a fair lead and winder so you could go anywhere in the shop oh without moving it out control it remotely and in fact you can take it out if you need to what do you mean control remotely that's the on off switch that's great doesn't that suck and then something fun here as well which is i made this originally for my metal working area but i haven't been able to find like good lighting and so this is something i just welded together and so with richard working over there yeah we actually get that you can leave that on right there so this one layup has about a six foot reach so it's a 12 foot diameter of what it's dealing with and so you basically can light almost every single table with a light that you can focus down right that's great so very useful uh very happy to have uh devices that stop if i put my hand in it yeah i've never seen a little sawstop either that's great yeah i wish there was like a little saw stuff that was more of a cabinet saw rather than a job site saw so you get some of the benefits but because i don't have room for an outfeed table or anything here [Music] also if you notice there's a blue oh yeah piping throughout the entire place that's actually a vacuum system um and all the tools uh that should be hooked up are hooked up to like a dust vacuum yeah oh cool and where i do something a little bit questionable with that it's actually that's why you'll see fire fire extinguishers everywhere in the workshop um this is actually hooked up um to the dust collection system as well what could go wrong and so uh it could all catch fire but you knew that already ah you tricked me i built a dust collection system for the belt grinder and oh yeah so you could put water in the tray and you could also put water in a collection system back there so there's actually a spark arrestor system that i built for it so anything that gets sucked down this metallic safe tube gets thrown into water and then just air comes back out yeah so i haven't seen fire come up there but i have seen things light up over here so a little bit questionable and then there is one other thing again storing stuff this is actually a surface grinder for the belt yeah i've never seen such a thing from the same amero braids on the same car you know you could walk through the shop and not realize everything is on wheels everything is somewhere everything in the wheels i love it this one if you take a look yeah came much higher off the ground which is what most people would use right right a good six seven inches off the ground but i needed a tabletop so i took the wheels off uh welded together some outriggers uh put that on put a steel top on and then i use these two beautiful surface plates here beautiful not surface plates picture plates so this is useful because i have a tapping arm and the tapping arm is el chipo from china and works amazingly well so for something you know just a couple hundred bucks right right it doesn't glide as beautifully as some other ones but works really well and again since there's not a lot of space you figure out how to slap storage everywhere great because it shows a few saunders machine works products in here and i can't walk away don't think we're not going to talk about this john came in and just busted my my heimer tip it's a vfd as well that's a reasonable belt grinder right holy cow oh my gosh oh my god it goes to 11. it's one louder over here uh is my main uh workbench so this is the same idea as the kaizen foam except i laser cut this out and so then i had something that's truly custom-made yeah for my drones and it's not that hard to redo you have a laser here as well of course electronic stuff is done over there i have oscilloscopes from many years ago when i was doing stuff that scope is phenomenal because you could actually debug hardware by monitoring protocols this is an air quality indicator and i don't breathe as well as most people okay and so i have an oxygen meter here which will go off if oxygen levels are not correct also uh various automation devices uh and also air quality so if this ever doesn't look right i get out of the room did you build this um this was something i just bought online um but i want to get something that integrates with the home automation then says get out right i have three three phase power it is not common to have it okay um but this was a multi-family dwelling before someone turned it into a private home got it those great cabinets there yeah that's the entire power distribution for the house oh my gosh and so uh yeah there's 400 amp three-phase power coming in this by the way i love it is a full hardware store yeah um and you know basically their draw after drawing way to go yeah and that works really well this is literally a dream like i don't i'm glad i didn't have this because i never would have left new york city yeah it's going to be there wait a second you're glad you left oh the other thing uh for the dust collection is it has a floor sweep oh yeah look at that so you actually just sweep stuff into that and out it goes um and then again squeezing more storage and so these are a small wheel holder and a large wheel holder for the belt grinder and then obviously a tormach 440. i've made a couple of mods to it oh that's much nicer i don't have room to open doors and get in the way yeah so i had to do this and it only cost about 20 bucks to do i put an automatic oiler because i usually forget to oil the machine so every time the machine turns on or every six hours or whatever it oils itself there's another mod this is all attached to an arm yep so that swings out of the way over here is a plasma table this is incredible and so uh right now oh you see the orange right blanks are being laid out but there's a full water table and the water table though has this pump system so you hook up air over here and then you just press that and it fills the take a ballasted and you press it the other way and it empties the tank that's incredible um and then also from a plasma standpoint again there's no room this is amazing so yeah you actually figure out ways of extracting you know also automatic height control really a little tracks along it cool and then in fact over there you'll see uh some welding gear that one's mig there's tag on the left water cooled torches which really help and then there's a spot water over there and then you know obviously you need drills and you start getting bigger but there's bigger than that and i'll show you quickly over here this is the actual tool storage room where projects are stored over there and tools are stored over here so there's a full mag drill incredible which by the way this is phenomenal i don't need it much but when i do right we got a press so we could test pressure oh okay and i didn't have this before uh and but it turns out to be useful for other things but we got this so we could actually see whether we can form things and what amount of pressure it takes and try to simulate the depths yep i don't know how well we did with the simulation but our results came out good so yeah we'll use that and then uh obviously raw material you have to have some raw material and that's there there and all kinds of weird plastics carbon fiber etc this is what richard was referring to when he was talking about getting something down the stairs it's a high precision precision matthews lathe and this is about as big as you possibly can get into this place without killing someone and we came awfully close and so we actually had to put this down like a big tuna oh my gosh and so all the oil in the head started flowing out while doing that so richard was on top of the hole lowering this down with oil dripping everywhere with the chain hoist uh and all that and his wife constantly calling perfect come on we have a gantry it's amazing which was useful for hoisting this up onto the platform and moving in sure this is great both having these set up and then obviously the storage did you then cut and bend these yourself yeah and yeah these are these are you know they're trivial they're tiny little things so i said um i think i cut them all by hand i don't even think i use the plasma cutter to to do anything else and just use a piece of standard uh mounting yeah what is that called the unit uni strap right what is this tool here this razor blade uh is actually something i made and so if you're cutting really thin brass tubing yeah it turns out that any kind of pressure tool will actually distort the tubing sure so you can't have concentric tubing but a razor blade like this that's slowly inched in yeah will actually cut it perfectly yeah and no distortion sure so i actually machine that one day there's a um it's worth googling a um tangential diamond turning tool i may be getting that wrong but it's a small industrial diamond mounted kind of in a strange way angled up like that for high precision low force if i'm doing this for memory way of turning and totally not what you'd see that kind of reminds me of that well i should definitely take a look at that but there's other fun things so this is actually just a regular bar which i mount in here for hand turning so you're saying your post you got it so the tool post and then other fun uh things which is just a very simple alignment yep so you just bring it up to the front bring it up to the side and boy anyone could make that yeah i know because i did this is also again what can fit here i would have preferred something a little bit larger but this is actually a fairly precise mill but it's just you know it's obviously not as rigid as a bridgeport or something like that but it has some nice things it has you know automatic draw bar um has full dro feed and everything else so we we come in here it's incredible so this used to be a computer room and now these are the three computers that run the entire show three little automation stuff three well that's home automation that is just general network functions like firewall and stuff like that uh and then this is a phone system so we have run a number of businesses out of our house at times we probably don't need a phone system anymore yeah and door opening and stuff like that and then this is just to deal with the all the networks and stuff in the house but even so i picked up one of one of these little little engine cranes or whatever for a shop crane uh to put the lathe in place and turns out there's room if you find room laser cutter yeah um and also full vacuum system for the laser cutter oh interesting um which also turns on the air because i reached in the back right and put a compressor in it resin uh printer yeah uh regular fdm yep there is an air compressor that's actually in that room cool but you'll enjoy how the air compressor works so so you you do a lot of stuff live and you know you're recording so that would be an on air light yeah that's the air on light and so if i turn off the compressor i love it and also it has an auto vent um because we get the water out of it what that reminds me that i now all of a sudden want is a pressure gauge that lights up giving you a 20 second warning that the air is about to turn on so that if you're doing something where you care you know it's about to happen that's actually a really good idea that is pretty much uh everything in the shop are you ready yeah yeah this is so cool it's not just a sand table i actually love the motor noise uh it used to make much less noise before it was shipped look at that what's cool is if anyone wants to make one the software is now up on github and there's tons of different uh drivers draw you know animals it will automatically google a picture of something and then draw it etc this is one of those like life-changing moments when i first met mike and he showed me this and he said what do you want to draw and basically what he explained i'll see if he corrects me but it was r2d2 or minnie mouse or a stapler and it what he the code he wrote will parse or search google it'll find something it will somehow vector it or trace it or outline it and then it'll convert that it'll wipe the table clean and then it'll convert that into the stepper motion it's amazing and in fact i used to have that hooked up to the various amazon and google alexa devices um and alexa send michael dubno money alexa stop you should just be able to say hey ask sand table to draw a giraffe that's amazing yeah and so kids would control this so uh you know there's now a commercial product that does uh drive really yeah but not as cool yeah as my school if you notice uh with the sand table one of the things it's doing is it says okay there's a regular static table that you have in a house everyone has a table right and people have lamps and wouldn't it be interesting to find out what would happen if your lamp or your table can do more and that you could actually talk to it and get it to do something different this device is called tentalux i made pretty much every single part that's on it and even the motor control is done as servos and things like that and if you take a look at just like one of the arms well it's crazy look at that move and so you could see that i'm moving this interface okay you're controlling that and that's moving or i could do it all together trippy or i could do them all in the same direction so oh look somebody's at the door or you could do that but it also has the ability to dim the lights etc but also to point so here's an example i'll put my phone plate with a fish on it okay so here's my phone and here's this oh you have a camera view of it look at that and so i now press that and that points all the lights and now let's point it at that dish over there and it's doing that or point to the center and so then figured okay well there's no reason why this has to be limited in that way so let's actually make it so it could remember uh poses so here it's pointing at various art items in the room okay and here it is now turning into an internal chandelier the range of motion is actually incredible so here is now a chandelier or it could be a focused uplighting um yeah you could just focus on something but in addition to all that you realize that there's no reason why it couldn't just be told to animate in some manner so it's doing what are called like dances or movements and this is a a wave dance and then you could see that you could also sort of do ripple so one of the arms is moving around and the other will start doing it etc yeah and then there's something you know really creepy this one is cool even though the lights are off you'll notice something which is it's breathing oh my gosh yeah we now have it on a vision system so if i have a plate um do we have any plates does anybody have a plate that looks pretty close that's amazing so it doesn't it's not sure if it likes it yeah that's amazing so if you notice it will actually start following it around my guess is the translucent uh aspect of it is confusing it a little bit um here's another thing that looks like a plate so what's it if it has multiple it will then divide and have some of the arms looking at it you could also ask it to do scenes and stuff like that let's see what would work uh okay google uh turn on tentalux eye light okay google turn on tentalux mostly up what is this written in like i understand the mechanical side but like how do you do this most of the stuff is just written in uh python so it's interesting the motor controllers these are my own servos because i didn't see anything that you could actually turn off power to and the server would stay there so the thing is that i don't want this humming all the time yeah and so i wanted to go there and stop and so these are actually worm gear motors oh hence no back driving yep and the one gear motors have a hall effect sensor to figure out positioning i then wrote some code to turn them into servos and so they slow down and all this other stuff so there's a pid loop with acceleration and so forth pid got in there and that turned out to be relatively straightforward the difficult part was doing light dimming okay and the reason for that is that the light actually has a microcontroller in it oh and so if you're pulsing something with a microcontroller it's trying to figure out what you're trying to do and it starts arguing with you and then it turns out that the timers on arduinos line up at times so there's multiple timers in an arduino and when they all line up they actually over current and suddenly don't work and so the lighting turned out to be harder than the motor control which i thought it was going to be just the opposite but it would do things like literally the arduino would just fail so stop and the reason for it is that all of the lights were on pulse up at the same time and the current draw was just too great and just went interesting one arduino per two arms for motor control okay one arduino for all lighting control and so that's now four arduinos and then one raspberry pi to do vision and uh interface and that also controls the arduino yep so this this eye that was the first time i did any real complex machining so that's basically most of the lunacy that's here it's amazing you do a better job than anybody i know of tying together i mean it's not just making stuff it's the software side and turning it into a project whether it's artistic form or completion it's really cool thank you very much for showing us the tour at the shop we'll post some other links and descriptions of stuff we talked about otherwise folks hope you learned something hope you enjoyed take care see you soon

Channel: NYC CNC

Views: 191,684

Keywords: tormach, how to, cnc, machine shop, nyc cnc, DIY, machining, milling, cnc machining, cnc milling, learn cnc, john saunders, workholding techniques, fixturing, saunders machine works, fixture plates, the mariana trench, geocache, international space station, michael dubno, richard garriot, new york city, machine shop tour, home shop tour, how to organize a home cnc shop, manufacturing, technology, software development, orrery, tormach 440, small cnc shop tour

Id: 5PgLXFf4avU

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021