It's been a while since I last added an update, so I thought I'd let you know I'm still working away at it. This is definitely a 'one man band' act here, and sometimes it gets a little off key. :P

What I'm doing at the moment is writing up the assembly manual for it. I'm sticking together another machine, pretty much, documenting each step of the way with plenty of photos. In my opinion, the documentation is not only a very important part of something like this, but it's also the one part I dislike the most. So hang in there with me, please.

I'm setting up to do some more runs in the next few days to a week, and with any luck I'll have some good stuff to show you. I took the time last week to make myself a little USB microscope out of an old web cam that's been in the junk box for years, and it seems like it'll work pretty fair for getting you a close up view of what this thing is capable of. Basically, I took a web cam with a busted up case, flipped the lens around and hot glued it back into place.

Then I scrounged around in my junk and found an old, solid built, Dremel drill press stand in a box in the basement. Perfect! I disabled the return spring in it so it would hold it's position, then wire tied the web cam onto it. It's got a real fancy handle, too! (What that means is the handle was missing, and I just clamped a small vise-grip to it). Anyway...

I put this contraption together a few days before HackaDay did that 'stay scrappy' article, and thought the timing was about perfect! THIS is why I keep all that stuff my wife calls junk around, stuffed into boxes in the basement, most of the closets, the attic and, if she looked close, even behind some of the books in the bookcases. :D

You just never know when it will come in handy, that's all there is to it. And with the kid all grown up and on his own, I have the room, no matter what the wife says. Lol.