Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

We've designed the perfect Tornado Tube for our water rockets, and put it out for everyone to use.

Tornado Tubes actually come from educational science materials. They are a coupler that will link a pair of soft-drink bottles together, so that a demonstration of a Vortex can be created easily in science classed. The standard design was quickly identified by people in the Water Rocket community as a way to make larger water rockets by linking bottles together for increased volume.

However, the science toy tornado tubes are not ideal for water rockets because they have a constricted throat that reduces flow, and they were never meant to contain high pressures.

We designed our Tornado Tube specifically for Water Rockets. They have a fully unrestricted mouth, and our innovative external o-ring sealing system. We've tested the designs to 200PSI (the bottled burst before the print fails).

Check out a video showing our practical application of 3D printing:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6wLRHK3ATE[/youtube]

Watching the end of the video, placing components with tweezers, It occurred to me that you need to replace your hotend with a vacuum pick up, and figure out how to use your printer for a pick and place machine.

Mac The Knife wrote:Watching the end of the video, placing components with tweezers, It occurred to me that you need to replace your hotend with a vacuum pick up, and figure out how to use your printer for a pick and place machine.

That's a great idea! The thing is I only have the one printer and it runs pretty much all the time, so I'd never be able to get time to do it. When the Eris comes out, I might give it some consideration.

On second thought, it has a large enough build area for the boards I usually make, but it might not have the room for the parts to pick from.

Neat little design and great to see another commercial product coming off these.

Re Pick n Place: orientation issues might mean the need for a 4th axis (spin on the pickup) and there's often enough slop in the QFN etc part trays to mean a pickup and drop based solely on mechanical positioning of the PCB and part tray will lead to positioning being a pin out. If you have a bit of a search there's one or two open source imaging pick and place projects out there that do it properly with video registration and alignment. Some cool thinking and project work!

If you do a lot of boards, it would probably be very much worth it to pick up a cheap Kossel kit and build a dedicated Pick n' Place machine out of it - ever one I've ever seen has been a delta anyway.

Is that "solder paste" you're wiping on the board with the mask?

g.