Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] Question fro Jon Elson

mdickey@... wrote:

> Hi Jon,
>
> I was perusing your website this morning and have a question. What,
> in layman's terms, does the equip. in the "Nuclear Instrumentation"
> section do? If the CIA has to send out a guy in dark glasses with a
> silenced pistol to greet me tonite after you explain it to me, that's
> OK, don't tell me, my family needs me to hang around a while yet!

This is stuff I design at my "day job" at Washington University. At night,
I
make copies of this gear for other universities' researchers who are doing
similar work in the field on basic nuclear science. That is the area still
doping out what holds the neutrons and protons together in atoms, the stuff
that the "real physicists" abandoned 30 years ago to go hunting for quarks.

What I have done is build some very compact gear that processes signals
from nuclear detectors in these experiments that are done at the national
labs like Lawrence Berkeley (national) Lab, Argonne, Oak Ridge, etc.
They all handle 16 signal channels per module, and have preamplifiers,
signal shapers, etc. to prepare the signals for being digitized by an analog
to
digital converter.

> Your Mini EDM blew me away! Being a new car dealer svc. manager,
> I've had to deal with my share of broken, seized studs in aluminium
> (uhhh, aluminum, I do British cars) and an EDM system would be
> awesome. I wonder if a hex shaped path could be programmed to cut a
> hole through the stud for an allen wrench to extract it. I've heard
> the story about the CNC laser that was used to burn a 6mm hex shaped
> hole in a cyl. head stud buried deep in the bowels of some rare old
> Ferrari engine. I can only dream!

You could just burn a perfect hex hole using an old allen wrench as the
electrode. I'll have to try that sometime! The problem with the allen
wrench
is it puts a lot of expanding force on the bolt head, and so it has to be
hardened. If you tried this in a soft material it would probably expand the

stud when you applied torque, maybe jamming it tighter. A square or
Torx-like pattern might do better for extraction. (Of course, these
so-called
EZ-out gadgets REALLY expand the stud, too.)

Jon