I always won­dered how an M&M was made. Even as a kid, I couldn’t help won­der­ing how they got that sugar coat­ing so per­fectly formed around that choco­late core. Every time … ! I don’t think I ever found one that showed any sign of actu­ally hav­ing been made by a real per­son. I never have been able to tour that M&M fac­tory but I did fig­ure out how to make a few other things. So I decided now it’s time to see what I can share about mak­ing stuff — and per­haps see what I can learn as well.

I’ll start with this:

These cam­eras entailed more trick­ery than I had orig­i­nally antic­i­pated. (If you are a maker of things, you prob­a­bly just thought to your­self “Imag­ine that!”) Part of that trick­ery evolved from my fate­ful deci­sion to use a lot of curves for this design and to make them from cross-laminated, wood veneer parts.

The back of the cam­era includes a remov­able curved back and a top and bot­tom strip of mate­r­ial that becomes part of the camera’s body. The trick was to make these three parts in a way that would allow them to fit together in the same “plane” while also man­ag­ing the dif­fi­culty of hold­ing the pieces dur­ing fab­ri­ca­tion. The next three pho­tos show the solu­tion I came up with.

This image shows a vac­uum fix­ture for hold­ing the raw part on the left, the gang saw that does the cut­ting and an exam­ple of a raw panel ready to be cut. A rotat­ing fit­ting for the vac­uum line is vis­i­ble at the top of the vac­uum fixture.

This view show the saw gang arbor just past the end of cut. The han­dle vis­i­ble just to the right of the saw arbor would have been used to rotate the vac­uum fix­ture with the part in place past the gang saw while the vac fit­ting on top of the fix­ture allows the vac tube to remain sta­tion­ary. You can see the three parts along with the left­over waste strips at the top and bottom.

Once the basic fix­ture design was checked out, the base of the fix­ture was recon­fig­ured to allow for the attach­ment of a dust collection/safety shroud. A stan­dard shop vac hose con­nects to the port on the right side of the shroud. Just enough of the gang blade set pro­trudes to cut the stock with­out undue risk to the oper­a­tor. As the parts come off of the fix­ture, they were taped together to keep them in grain matched sets. With this fix­ture setup, a whole stack of raw pan­els can be cut into parts (that require only light edge sand­ing) in a very short time.

There nat­u­rally would be many ways of doing this but my par­tic­u­lar pro­ce­dure reflects my own expe­ri­ence and the tools and machines avail­able to me. I am for­tu­nate to have an Aciera milling machine in the shop (that should be a post!) so this pro­ce­dure was largely dri­ven by the milling machine mode of working.

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The orig­i­nal design for this cam­era included a built in LCD/pushbutton inter­face and a con­trol knob to change expo­sure slits. The cur­rent project entails con­vert­ing the cam­era to use a remote, hand held con­troller oper­at­ing through a blue­tooth radio inter­face. User com­mands are entered via a touch screen LCD interface.

This view of the inter­face shows the screen lay­out. The areas labeled Expo­sure, 360 Degrees, and 1/60 sec­ond plus the two arrows at the bot­tom of the screen are sen­si­tive to a touch to the screen. The red dots indi­cate that the user has cho­sen to change the camera’s angle of rota­tion. By press­ing either of the arrows, the dis­played angle can be changed. A press to the shut­ter speed but­ton offers sim­i­lar con­trol over the range of shut­ter speeds.
Once the set­tings have been made, the user can touch the Expo­sure but­ton and com­mence expo­sure. Once the expo­sure is under way, the bar graph above the arrows will indi­cate the progress of the cur­rent expo­sure.
Stay tuned for more details as the project moves toward completion.