The struggle against the shop critters that is….

Case in point: I primed and painted my wing light mounting brackets last evening and left them to cure overnight, and had planned on clear coating them after this good 24-hour cure.  However, upon entering the shop I saw some type of footprints and very visible scratches on the surface of one of the brackets (note bottom of pic).

So I cleaned up the scratches and prints off the brackets and hit them with another couple rounds of paint.  Tomorrow I plan on clear coating them… hopefully without issue.

I then did another big round of cleaning up the shop.  Alas, the squirrels, et al, really did do a number on my shop while I was gone on my Christmas/New Years adventures… there was downed insulation panels, tufts of pink fiberglass and poop pellets everywhere.  From here on out I really have no choice but to remove their primary objective: the ceiling fiberglass insulation.  They love this stuff as they burrow their way into it, pissing and pooping the whole way… and then shred it so that it comes down in a myriad of pieces vs the complete whole panels that I installed.

I’ll again remind ya’ll that the combination of the persistent colder weather along with significantly much less insulation on the ceiling of my shop is hampering my ability to keep the shop warm for composite work.  Thus my current meanderings on other tasks.

Speaking of which: back on the lathe, I did some facing and touch-off cuts on some scrap aluminum stock as per the Centroid Acorn CNC-12 Lathe manual in order to set up my CNC-12 tool library.  Below is a cut I made with a carbide insert tool with a fairly shallow depth of cut and a somewhat rapid feed.  I think it looks kinda cool so I threw the pic in here.

And here is a shot of the screen as I add all the tools to the Acorn CNC-12 tool library.

I’ll note that my initial smattering of lathe tooling is fine for hacking my way through some manual lathe ops and some basic CNC, but not —as I’m learning— for any refined or optimized CNC lathe operations.  Thus, I do now have a decent amount of tooling on order and am awaiting those to arrive as I strive to get seriously online with my ability to use the lathe to make serious parts.

Pressing forward.