It’s Saturday morning, September 24th, 2022, and I’ve decided to begin sharing a journey I’ve been on for a while now.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to write about this and share what my trials and discoveries on this journey have been, but I’ve been reluctant to, for various reasons I won’t get into at the moment.
A breakthrough achievement is ultimately what inspired me to buy www.zanderengineering.com and take the plunge. After working for a couple months now on an engineering project to design a custom-engineered 3D printer, proceeding to print one of the most critical components, and having it come out successfully exactly how it was supposed to, I decided this was more than just a hope – it was something about to undergo that metamorphosis from an idea to a real thing.
A History Lesson
Zander Engineering is the more formal and public beginning of a side of my life that’s been live for years now. I can remember as a young boy, I received a Lego set from one of my dad’s coworkers as a gift. Looking back, it seemed kind of strange, perhaps even fortuitous random event. What kind of person buys their coworker’s kid a gift? A rare one, I think. Granted, it was the 90s, and it’s a very different world we live in now.
It’s a gift that I’m very grateful for. That little car, I think it was, started an obsession with Legos. My parents and grandparents gifted me many, many more sets over those early years of my life. These gifts, I think, had quite a bit to do with what I’m writing now. They ignited the creative, imagining, designing, engineering, building gene inside me.
The sets came with instructions that showed how to take simple individual pieces and make something fantastic out of them. But the modularity of the parts also gave me the ability to take them back apart and build new things.
The original sets I got were the more aesthetically-oriented models, typically brick based, sets that had no real functional value. As time went on, I got more of the Technic sets. The Technic sets differed in that the designs yielded models that could do things. Here’s a quote from the Lego website itself:
LEGO® Technic launched in 1977 as the Expert Builder series. It was renamed Technic in 1984. The purpose of LEGO® Technic is to build advanced models using a different building style than brick-based LEGO® sets. Technic sets use specialized pieces, sometimes including motors and pneumatic elements, to create much more functionality than you can get with regular bricks. Technic pieces are very versatile and completely compatible with other LEGO® pieces, so you can often find them in other themes as well.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/help/technic/technic/about-lego-technic-kA009000001dckiCAA#:~:text=The%20purpose%20of%20LEGO®,can%20get%20with%20regular%20bricks.
These Technic sets helped me, to move beyond the typical visual designs to actually begin to understand different mechanical aspects. The first few sets I got had pneumatics in them, which were my first foray into models with motion. There were several subsequent models that had small motors with battery packs – very, very cool.
When the Lego Mindstorms set launched in 1998, it completely changed things for would-be engineers like myself. I remember being so excited seeing it, but so disappointed seeing the price $200, wondering how I would ever get my parents to spring for it.
Eventually, they did.
The Mindstorms set added a small computer called the RCX, which had a very basic but capable computer in it, an 8-bit Renesas H8/300 Microcontroller, with 32kb of ROM. It was powered by 6x AA batteries. It had three inputs for sensors (touch and optical) and three outputs for motors. It came with a software suite where you could use drag and drop blocks on the computer to create programs where it would run functions and use input from sensors to react to the world around it, and a nine-pin serial infrared transmitter to wirelessly download the programs to the RCX.
For that time, it was a very high-tech system, and it worked quite well.
The Effects of a Toy
All of these events were integral to my personal development. They instilled in a very young and impressionable mind this idea that, if you have an idea, and if you can find a way or read how to put the individual pieces together, you can do just about anything. It also got me interested in machines and got my brain pumping thinking about all the different things you could create a machine to do.
And in the process of designing and building these ideas I was dreaming up, it taught be about all the things that go into a good design, and the challenges that any designer faces with ensuring that their design is balanced and functional.
I learned about how to counteract the forces encountered in design, how to properly support weight, avoiding deflection in beams, countering torsion in rotational drives by ensuring the proper sizing of drive axles, different ways to secure things, and a whole host of other considerations. I developed this kind of sixth sense in engineering that gave me the ability to look at a design and rather quickly determine where the weak points were, and where failure might be about to occur, so that I could adjust.
The Application
I stopped playing with Legos as I grew older and began to inherit the responsibilities of my maturation toward adulthood. I still took them out from time to time, but I longed for some kind of system, more modern, that might give me the ability to build stronger, tougher, more capable machines.
During the height of the pandemic, I decided to revisit a high-school era hobby / business I had, making candles. The pandemic and the ensuing instability it had created in the economy and by proxy the job market meant that a lot of people were out of jobs. There were tons of people getting into candle making, and every other form of crafting, ready to start a new life for themselves and leave the companies that had left them.
While I still had a job, I had a similar desire to move on and eventually become my own boss, and to do something I really enjoyed and had some sense of direction and control over.
The problem we all were dealing with, unfortunately, were the supply chain constraints that affected the inventory of raw supplies. Vessels, the containers used for candle making were one of those, most of them being made in China and shipped over to the United States.
The idea of finding a container I liked, building a product line around it, producing say a couple thousand of these, creating a following with customers, and then having that supply dry up and having to reinvent things just didn’t sit well with me.
As I sat around in my studio, I became really frustrated with how dependent we as a country had become so dependent for the quality of life we all enjoyed on another country, really, a set of countries halfway across the world.
This was a weakness of the grandest proportions, one that I was intent to find a way around.
I decided that my mission going forward (something that is one of the integral core values of Zander Engineering) was going to be to subvert the supply chain constraints by becoming my own supplier, to as great a degree as possible. The goal, in whatever I did, was to minimize the number of things I had to order, and to make whatever I had to order as common and readily available as possible.
I looked into different options. Aluminum and glass were the most common vessel materials. Making my own glass containers would require a tremendous investment in equipment, and a lot of space to produce it, as would aluminum. Though it was not as popular, I noted some manufacturers used concrete. Concrete, while kind of heavy, was everywhere, had low production costs, and was easily formed into molds. It was perfect, at the very least for getting this company off the ground until I had the means to produce my own glass and aluminum vessels.
I did a little research, looked into what would be necessary to create some molds, saw the need to create a “master mold” to cast some silicone molds from, and I ended up purchasing a 3D printer off Amazon to 3D print that master mold. I’d heard a little about 3D printing before, but had only really seen it used for little action figures and trivial esoteric goods. I suppose I knew it had also been used for manufacturing functional parts, but that had never been something on my radar, so I’d never paid much attention to it.
A Whole New World
Getting a 3D printer, learning CAD, and how to create things was like getting my first Lego set all over again.
It was, in effect, that new more capable means for making things that I’d been longing for to quench that creative itch I got from time to time. I spent some time working on the molds, which then got the wheels turning to look into creating soap. I created several test runs, and then decided I’d like to create my own custom soap molds.
While the 3d printed mold masters worked okay, I encountered issues with horizontal banding showing up in the molds. When a 3d printer prints a part, it’s basically taking a three-dimensional shape, and drawing it out with molten plastic filament, one layer at a time, creating honey-comb like structures inside of it to give it strength and rigidity. In doing that, it creates lines. I didn’t like that.
I did some more research and found that the preferred way to make these silicone molds was actually to carve the mold masters out of a dense material – usually a modeling foam, something like the pink sheets of foam insulation used in homes. This was commonly done with a CNC router.
As I looked into CNC routers and discovered all that you could do with them, I saw yet another new product stream for my company – carved and engineered wood products. As I learned about fourth-axis CNCs, I saw all that could be done to create amazing goods. I decided that if I was going to get a CNC, I was going to not just get a simple one, but a very capable one.
The problem was the cost. They were all rather expensive, the good ones anyway. And the class-leading ones that were borderline affordable all were designed with parts and in ways that made the engineer inside me question whether the bang for the buck was really there. I looked into the possibility of building my own CNC, to see if I could save some money and come out with a better product.
There were several different DIY CNCs, but they all had their tradeoffs and pain points that users dealt with. I decided, with what I knew, that I could analyze and critique these designs, and come up with something better; more suited to my needs. Something that would stand up to the test of time and high duty cycles that I knew, if I was to use these to start producing products to sell, they would encounter.
Zander Engineering
That’s about the moment that the idea for Zander Engineering actually really began to take off. That was in _____.
Over the next few months, I went through a number of different design iterations, before finally reaching a point where I was happy enough to build a BOM (bill of materials, a list of everything you need to order to build something) and start ordering.
The objective that I had were:
- Easy-to-Source – something that, where off-the-shelf parts were required, those parts were as few in number and as common as possible, to avoid the inevitable dreaded manufacturing and supply chain interruptions, and to enable easy redesign / substitution when and if necessary
- Easy-to-Build – something that, in being made up of a high percentage of user-printed parts, was designed in such a way that these parts could be printed from common, easy-to-print materials, and designed in such a way that even less-than-perfect(ly calibrated) printers could (still) yield usable parts
- Robust yet Brisk – something that (eschews the en vogue obsession with ultimate speed and lightness, something that) is strong and stable, perhaps at the expense of ultimate speed, but equipped with motors and tools with plenty of power overhead such that adequate speeds can still be reached.
((The beauty of this design approach is in what it means for my ability to create completely custom parts that might not otherwise be available to create a better design.))
The problem that I encountered was that several panels I had designed, that I intended to have cut from aluminum and custom machined to act as integral frame portions, ended up coming out to be completely cost-prohibitive. Though my machine was much more stable and robust than the machines I could’ve easily bought, it was also set to be about twice the cost if I went this way.
As I looked at my options, I saw that while aluminum was expensive, it was the machining that really cost so much. What I was needing to do in terms of machining was rather simple, so after a little research I went on Amazon and bought a small desktop CNC capable of doing aluminum.
Unfortunately this machine was a disaster.
While it was built well, the whole control aspect of it – the process of creating a model, loading it, and running the GCODE (a type of file with instructions used to tell a machine what to do) – was damned near impossible. Being a Mac user made it even worse, as all the programs ran on Windows, and as such, not very well.
After looking into the viability of 3D printing these parts instead and determining that it should meet the needs of the project adequately, I decided to return the unit and go a different direction.
The Final Straw
The problem that I encountered (are you beginning to see a pattern?) was that unfortunately the Ender 5 Pro 3d printer I had was just a bit too small to handle the size of these pieces. I researched what it would cost to have someone else print these for me, and given that, and the fact that much of the rest of the CNC machine was to be put together with 3D printed parts, I decided to get a new, more capable 3D printer.
As I looked at my options, there were many, but it was the same story as with the CNC. There were options, but they were all rather expensive, as they had the essential CODB (cost of doing business) that supports the company, the engineers, and provides user support built into them. I looked at a number of different open source options, but I didn’t care for them as they didn’t really fit the criteria I had for the printer, nor the engineering ethos that I’d developed.
I set out in _____ with a short list of objects to design, just as I’d just finished doing with the CNC project, a suitable 3D printer. Like the CNC, it was to be easily-sourced, easily-built, and robust.
Yesterday, I reached the completion point of the working draft.
There are a few small things left to put together, but on the whole, it is a complete design with no large variables left out in the open.
That closes this post up, and now, hopefully we’re all caught up to speed, and I will continue on with regular posts detailing what goes on from here.
Thanks for reading!