Beer making step 2

2nd step of the beer was done last Friday. Now all the 11 liters of beer are bottled.
This time the process was easier, after cleaning all the bottles and adding some sugar to the beer, the bottles have to be filled.

It is very interesting the tool to put the caps to the bottles. It is a manual tool, so simple but perfect for a home brewed beer.

Finally here you are all the bottles filled and closed, waiting for a 2nd fermentation. And also the watch that helped me to make so hard work... a hard watch! A Casio G-Shock DW-9400.

Now it's time to wait :)

New watches at home (Casio's)

A bunch of new watches at home!

Alba, Seiko M796 ??

New watch at home!
This time a rare plastic version of the well known Seiko M796, an Alba re-branded for a German shop.
The watch is a diver, with barometer, depth meter, temp. sensor and a lot of functions for scuba diving. 
The watch is in working condition and only needs to be cleaned. 
Mini-review will come soon.

Design Tip -12

After some days without design tips. Here you are a new tip to avoid/minimize the sink marks on the screwing towers.
This tip is very easy to apply at the beginning of the design but it has a higher cost if it is applied after the mold finish.
So my suggestion is to apply it to the design and only remove it if it created some flow lines. Sometimes it can create flow lines that could be critical for not painted and visible parts, for chrome plated parts and also for very thin paints. On parts with regular paints or parts with primer the flow lines won't be visible.
The tip consists on increase a little bit the recess of the central hole. This design reduces the "ball" that creates the sink marks. It is important to not to make the recess too big in order to avoid flow line problems. There is not a magic number for this dimension. On my applications (small parts with thickness around 2 mm) I use recesses from 0.4 mm to 0.8 mm. 
This won't be the only tip about the screw towers, it is a feature quite difficult to design. .

ebay watch selling

Today I've posted some of my watches to ebay. It is the first time I'm trying to sell some of my watches by this well known auction site. 
Let's see if I'm lucky and I can get some money to be able to buy more watches.
All my auctions could be found under my user name ultraptua

Cleaned Casio JP200W

And now cleaned, polished and with fresh battery! Nealry 20 years and still working like the first day. Who said Casios are not good watches?

Casio JP200W

First picture of the watch, not cleaned and battery not replaced. I need some time to put it in working order.

Casio JP200W arrived

Another watch at home! Today arrived the Casio JP200w. A digital watch with pulse meter function. Pictures soon.

Ricoh Riquartz

Two of the Ricoh Riquartz watches are working! Only one of them still not in work condition...

Design Tip - 11

On the Design Tip - 2 I talked about the fillets of the holes. The fillets are very important on a plastic part, so here you are another design tip about them.

The 2 pictures have the same plastic part sketch. It is a flat shaped part with a round slot. The top picture do not has fillets, and the second one has fillets (red color).
The fillet is useful from the design point of view, the part will be easier to be correctly filled and also easier to be painted. Sharp edges are not good for painted parts.
But the point I want to talk about on this tip is the mold construction process. The not filleted part has to be done with an EDM mold, while the filleted one could be done with a machined mold. 
When I worked for EU and US automotive marked this was not an issue, most of the molds were done by EDM, but now I'm working for another market and all our molds and production is in China. I've seen our toolmakers prefer to machine the molds (not to EDM), some of them only have small EDM machines to make small ribs, gussets and things like this.
In that case to add a radius on the part design could help our tool maker to make a cheaper mold, apart of this, some moldmakers simply add the fillet thew want/need. I prefer to add the fillet on the part so I'm able to define the radius (not to leave the decision on the moldmaker hands). To leave the decision on the mold maker hands usually means you will have fillets bigger than you wanted, if they can use bigger drills the machining time will be shorter.
So the final comment is, you have to talk with the toolmakers, know their skills, their facilities and see what they are able to do and what they are not able to. Then design taking into account those inputs. 

Beer making

Not only watches and scuba diving... Beer is another of my hobbies. Last Friday I did my second batch of homebrew beer.
The first batch was done some months ago and the result was not so good I had some problems with the yeast. I hope this time the beer will be better.
The main process of the first day was the following:
1 - Clean all the tools (very important step)

2 - Yeast moisturize

3 - Opening the kit tin. Will this brown thing be beer? I hope so :)

4 - Preparing the potion. I'm an alchemist!

5 - After mix 'the potion' with fresh water and cooling it till 25ºC, the moisturized yeast has to be added and all the mix stirred well to add air on the mixture

6 - Then close the bucket, put the airlok and wait for the 1st fermentation!

Design Tip - 10

The snaps are a quite difficult feature to correctly design. There are a lot of good snap design guidelines but it seems some designers do not check them before to start a design. On the Design Tip - 5 there is one snap design tip, let's go to the second one.Few months ago I received some CAD files to check, and one of the snaps was like the first picture (it is a sketch no the real part I received). 
When I saw the snap design I had to check if it was a joke or there was any hidden camera in my office. The designed snap should be assembled by the end user of the product! I mean a person not used to assembly plastic parts. The snap do not has a guidance to help the assembly, instead of a chamfer it had a fillet and the snap was too thick and created sink marks on the visible area of the part.
The snap design was modified to something close to the second picture. A good chamfer, with the same degrees of the other part, good to guide and assembly the part. The second important improvement was to reduce the thickness of the base of the snap in order to minimize the risk of sink marks.
The base thickness reduction is an important tip, but be careful. The snap becomes very weak at that area and it is difficult to fill and pack. Sometimes 1 small gusset at the back of the snap or 2 small ones at the front solve the weakness problems. If the snap needs calculations to get a specific snap force, or you want to check if the snap resin is working on the elastic or plastic area, it is important to take into account that the snap thickness is not constant and that most of the snap deflection will be on the lower part of the snap.

Citizen Aqualand Classic

One of the watches I'm looking for is the Citizen Aqualand I  (aka Aqualand Classic).
It is a diver watch, in my opinion one of the most interesting diver watches in the market.
The watch case and screwed back are made of stainless steel, mineral glass, unidirectional rotating bezel, highly visible hands and rubber band.
The watch has all the standard diver watch functions plus a depth gauge up to 80m (totally enough for most divers). The depth gauge not only tells the current depth, it is also able to log the last 4 dives (max. depth, dive time and dive date). It also has some useful dive alarms, depth alarm, dive time alarm, fast ascent alarm and abnormal depth alarm (?).
The watch is Diver's 200m certified.
It is a classic diver watch very robust and well appreciated by divers, a must have.
The only problem I can find to this watch is the size, it is a quite big watch. It is not a problem for me because I have big hands, but could be a problem with people with tinny hands and wrists.
I'm looking for a used one, if possible the original one and not the new re-edition. Let's see if I'm able to find something not so expensive in ebay.

The picture is from Citizen Spain web site (http://tomcat.citizen.es/home.htm). I hope to not to break any copyright law by posting the picture from their site. As a 'watch I'm looking for' I don't have any sample to take my own pictures :(

Watches I'm looking for

Watches I'm looking for.
I would like to share with you the watches I'm looking for. Explain why, what are they functions, etc.
I also want to post some pictures of the watches, bus still too new on this blog world and I don't know what can I post and what I can't due to copyright issues.

Design Tip - 9

Before to start the design of a plastic part, it is important to check the external surfaces.
In some designs, the external surfaces, are defined by another company (the customer or an external designer), another department of the same company, sometimes they come from scanned surfaces, etc.
It is important to check the surface quality before to start to design the plastic part. If this job is done after the part is designed and the original surfaces need to be changed, part of the work will be wasted. So before to start, to check.
Most of CAD software have different tools to analyze the surfaces, zebra analysis, curvature analysis, etc. Apart of this useful tools, it is important to look at the surfaces, their boundaries and isoparmetric curves. Sometimes it is not necessary to use any tool to see that the surfaces are not correct. See the attached picture. Is really necessary to use the zebra analysis to see that the surfaces need to be redone? So before to use special tools, take a look to the file and use the common sense.
An external surface with a lot of patches, small patches, strange shaped patches and isoparametric curves with strange shapes and not continuous through the boundary surfaces is a very bad sign.
To correct the surfaces is not an easy job, the easiest way is to give CAD file to a surf expert to solve the problems using a free form design software.

Fake watch

I'm planing to make a review of this fake watch. I bought it during a trip to China. It is a fake watch, low quality fake. It has a very interesting feature such as a day wheel from day '0' to day '39', very useful if you live on a planet where months have 40 days :)
I'll post pictures of the watch as soon as I have some time to open 'the monster'. 

Casio ARW-320 watch arived

Last day before vacation the ARW-320 arrived.
First picture out of the box. Time to change batteries and see how it works.