On Tue, 2012-10-09 at 12:03 -0700, craig wrote: > Thanks all for several interesting ideas. I am currently reviewing > responses. > > most of the equipment and the control software for ball pick and place > from several bins of balls has been designed and built and tested, but > is not yet mounted on the machine or tested all together. I think the > difficult part of pick and place is done. > > I have considered the following approaches to glueing balls into the > cavities. > > 1. a. dispensing a hot melt glue into cavities (exact method to be > determined) > b. placing balls where desired (possibly only partially in > the indentation) > c1. pressing down on the balls with a heated plate or iron > (more efficient and elegant) > c2. heating in oven then pressing down. (less equipment) > The only obvious problem seems to be dispensing hot melt glue onto the > cavity walls.
Don't forget ultrasonic welding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_welding If there were already a bead of hot glue in the cup or on the ball, the joint can be heated ultrasonically. > Using equipment made for reprap experimenters might work if I can find > a clear hot melt glue in the thin diameter form factor. > Moving small rods of material seems easier than variable viscosity liquids. > Dispensing the small ammount needed (aprox .01 - .02 cc) seems much more > difficult using much larger diameter glue sticks. I would tend to use a normal glue gun, then add a stick pusher/puller. The ball picker that also rotates could pick up a ball, pass it to a glue dispenser or glue gun and rotate a bead on the joint area, then place it in the cup. A UV cure adhesive might be handy and might use an automatic syringe. > 2. dipping the boards > The problem is surface clean up. The wood surface should remain > appealing without coating the ball tops with anything. > if dipped and dried before placing balls. The surfaces could be > sanded after drying. What liquid clear adhesive can I activat after > drying, method? > > > 3. dipping the marbles > How can one remove the glue from the top surface of protruding > marbles without causing problems to the surrounding wood surfaces? I like the rubber ball idea mentioned earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pad_printing > 4. I will give some thought to dispensing and smearing liquid adhesives, > or heated hot melt adhesives with brushes or flaps. ... snip -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
