• Game, set, match.

    kristina panos • 07/27/2016 at 15:18 • 0 comments

    I have tested the dampener for at least four hours per week for the last eight weeks. Other than the type of slight shifting around that one would expect from a commercial dampener, it has stayed put. Time to open a custom dampener printing service or something.

  • 15-love.

    kristina panos • 04/14/2016 at 00:08 • 0 comments

    I just tested her out for about half an hour. It didn't budge, and it absorbed vibrations at least as well as the Vibrex dampener I had on there before. It also didn't seem to split any more, which is good because the slots are cut along the grain of the layers.

    Now we're scheming to slap a piezo on the thing and wire it to a microcontroller attached to my wrist.

  • Anyone for tennis?

    kristina panos • 04/10/2016 at 17:03 • 0 comments

    I printed a bigger version and cut slots into the sides with a breakaway utility knife. It grips the strings pretty firmly, so it should be okay.

    It's too wet for tennis today. Indoor dribbling tests with and without the dampener indicate a noticeable difference.

  • Lowercase 'k' in Cooper Black

    kristina panos • 04/10/2016 at 14:33 • 0 comments

    My initial idea was to make a dampener in the shape of a k. I figured that if the letter were fat enough, one string could rest in the stem and the other in the arm and the leg of the k.

    So, Cooper Black is pretty fat. That's the Tootsie Roll font. It's been around since 1921 and gets used in some funny places. It's very easy to instantiate letters in OpenSCAD:

    linear_extrude(height=10){
text("k", size=16, font="Cooper Black", center=true);
}

    If you don't linear_extrude() it, it's not a 3D object and it won't F6 or STL.

    So . . . I printed it and it came out great. But I miscalculated and it's not wide enough to be a vibration dampener. Now I have a squishy k to play with.