2024-09-28

Last modified: 2024-09-28 23:04:17

• Sovereign scales
• CAD model of house

Sovereign scales

Thinking a bit more about this, here's the way to make them out of aluminium with integrated counterweight:

• Start with a solid bar, in the vice, on high parallels.
• With a 6mm end mill, surface the top, cut out the outline down to a depth of just over 3mm, cut out pockets for coins.
• With a 1mm end mill, cut out the slots.
• With an engraving tool, engrave the writing, apply chamfers to top if desired.
• Now flip the part upside down, using some method to reference the horizontal location.
• With a 6mm end mill, remove the bottom side material, run an outline around the counterweight, and surface off the top of the counterweight.
• Now flip the part onto its side, using the same method to reference the horizontal location.
• With a 1.2mm drill, drill the pivot hole.
• Then manually drill a tiny spot into the counterweight to calibrate it, if required.

CAD model of house

I spent 3 hours waiting for FreeCAD to repeat largely the same calculations over and over again, but eventually reached this:

The main part of the roof is done! Even has cut-outs for the chimneys.

I still need the separate roof piece that goes over the kitchen, but that will be a separate Body so hopefully I won't have to keep waiting for it to recompute everything. Then once I've done that I think I'll move all the roof parts to a separate file so that saving/loading is faster.

Also I saw a good idea on a toy house the other day. It suggested brickwork on the walls by just having the odd brick present, and leaving the rest of it flat. That way you don't need to model every single brick, and the pattern of the brickwork isn't visually distracting (I guess). According to ChatGPT this is called "implied texture".