Gallery

On the right my homemade forge. On the left my attempt to make a small simple forge with a good efficiency. This was made as a higschool design project.

Various forged items. The firestriker is made from an old file. The chissel is made of two layers: C45 (carbon steel) and S235 (construction steel)

Forging layered steel "damast" from tool steel (C45) and construction steel (S235). 

A short bow made of Yew. The yew bow doesn't have a perfect tiler, but it works.

Aluminium anodizing and electrochemical etching of steel. 

hexagonal 2D crystal structure made of soap bubbles, a nice experiment to visualize what close-packed planes of atoms in crystals look like. 

Ideas from metal science we can see with this experiment: vacancies, dislocations, high-angle and low-angle grain boundaries. On the right is a screenshot of the pattern formed when zooming out on a digital screen. The bubbles interfere with the pattern of the screen (moiré pattern), which helps visualize that different grains have different orientations. 

A propane burner to melt bronze and aluminium. On the left a first test to see the effect of throttling the air supply.  

a bronze sword based on a picture from the British Museum (source lost). During the first attempt at casting the sword didn't completely fill.

At the second attempt, the sword filled, but the mold-making process was still difficult. The wooden sword was cut in half and glued onto a flat board. This should improve the stiffness of the template. The best after polishing and filling bubbles with solder is shown on the right.

At this point, there are so many failed bronze swords lying around that I soon will have to start remelting them.  As it turns out casting such long thin objects as swords is quite difficult with sand casting. It was traditionally done with clay or stone molds. For now this project was abandoned because of other priorities.

 Aluminum gears, aluminium prototype parts for a solar boat gearbox (DB-20 solar boat racing).

Universal testing machine, top left extensometer prototype, bottom left cast aluminium clamp, and right complete machine. My initial plan was to make the setup for testing cast aluminium, but I later realised that I won't be doing any casting in the near future, and I only need a machine for testing plastics. As a result, the frame and load cell are quite heavy-duty compared to the drive train. 

The logic gates shown on the left are 3D-printed clocked mechanical logic gates. ( XNOR and AND).

On the right, a clocked Mechanical adder. The complete adder is around 150x150mm and consists of 3 XNOR gates, 2 AND gates, and a NOT gate. The sum and carry output should be read inverted. Note that the carry out is placed such that it directly connects to the next layer if another full adder were stacked on top, making the design easy to scale to many bits. 

This design suffers from two inherent flaws. First of all, the small levers make it cumbersome to reset the logic gates and clocks. Secondly, the sliding connections in the gates require precise positioning and locking; any bi-stable plastic locking mechanism is bound to degrade by use. 

When I got this HLT 150, I had no clue whether it would work and how to use it. Luckily, the kind people at Pfeiffer supplied me with a manual straight out of the archive from 1989! After an oil change for the rotary vane pump and 3D printing a new case for the remote control, everything seems to work. Calibration is still a point of concern, as the latest indication of the internal leak is from 2003.

The Corona pandemic gave me time to explore new interests like drawing.  

On the left a portrait of questionable quality based on starwars lead Rey (Daisy ridley). On the right a full scale drawing of Rey I plan on using as a wall poster

Attempt to copy the artstyle of Sam Yang (samdoesarts on social media) from left to right the first picture contains sketches directly copied from his work, the second picture is a complete grey scale copy of one of his drawings.

Left, traced picture from alita battle angle I coloured it using only full black (and black dot patterns). This drawing was made for a screenprinting course. On the right a colour speedpaint of a monk sitting underneath a tree.

Tiny wax head. Pretty happy with the way it turned out.

large wax face. one side of the face is made in large planes while the other side is completly smooth. This was face was made solely for the purpose of practice and I have learned a lot from this exercise. 

 Minecraft creations

Left spaceship made for a comunity contest from the Planet minecraft website, right alien face concept.

Left Davy Jones from pirates of the caribbean movies, right monks carving the rock based on paintings from Rob Gonsalves. 

Fantasy city concept, city build inside a very large waterweel.