Hi gang,
Just because some of us have been talking about vibratory finishing,
and I had to play forklift tetris to get this thing into the shop
today, I figured I’d put up a picture of Knew Concept’s newest toy.
So… Say hello to our little friend.
This is what industrial vibratory machines look like. It’s 4000
pounds, 5 feet across, and takes somewhere between 900 and 1000
pounds of media to charge, and can run up to another 1000 pounds of
parts. You can’t see all of it, but the sandbags on the pallet
behind the blue drum are all media. Half a ton of it.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
The cool thing about it, in comparison to the normal jewelry scale
vibratories, is that it can unload on its own. That’s the ramp
across the front of the picture. You just flip the ‘unload’ lever,
and the parts march right out on the ramp. (assuming they’re bigger
than the media.) It also has automagic flowthru. That big blue drum
is 55 gallons of soap/fluid concentrate for it. It has a little pump
unit that you dunk in the drum, and it automatically meters out the
soap on the fly.
The really scary thing is that big as it is, it’s still too small to
do our 8" sawframes. We got it for doing some of our newer larger
parts, which don’t fit in the old machine. Besides, this one will
give a much better finish, in about 1/4 the time.
Lee keeps saying that Knew Concepts was supposed to be his
retirement after Bonny Doon. You know, just putter around, make a
few saws every now and then. Little stuff… Funny how it turned
out, no?
Cheers-
Brian
pictures so seldom that I don’t remember where that is. Thanks. Brian