Ski Builders Forum

Wow, your system is impressive by anyone's standards. I would be very interested in how the software side of things are done. I know it's already been brought up on the forum, but are you interested in selling plans / a software solution. The wife keeps me on a tight budget with this stuff, but it would be fantastic if we could work something out. Thank you in advance.

Any update?

yeah, some plans and software would be awesome!

OP, you should really consider making a set of wheels that would bend brakes for skis in at least one dimension, from there, bending a brake into it's "3D" shape would be easy. Honestly, you could make some decent cash selling FKS/Pivot brakes if you found a way to get around Rossi's patents and such. I'd be a happy guy if you did to, right now a pair of brakes for the FKS/Pivot runs a guy $65 and so much hassle from Rossignol.....

what about these plans for $10 you promised?

Still under construction. God some great new ideas to further optimize the design, but will finish my new CNC machine including drag knife first

I will update you later!

I heard from an insider source that Donek Tools, maker of the drag knife, will be offering a CNC edge bender for sale in the very near future. Price point, ~$5,000 USD.

I'd much rather pay for plans and tinker myself personally...

Sounds interesting.

If I remember it correctly he is using the same bending principle as I am using, so look forward seeing his final product.

A while ago I did contact Sean of Donek Tools as he seemed to have difficulties programming the code for the edges to bend. We had a short chat by email, but I think he did want to solve this himself to sell this product later on

About the price you tell; it does cost a lot to develop such a tool (time, prototypes, waist steel edge), so it not a crazy amount of money for a tool that saves you a lot of time. It just depends on what your ideals are.

Cheers

buy 2 motors from cnc routerparts.com and a gecko drive, get mach 3 and after that just start tinkering with g codes... no?
(aside from building the roller bearings, etc), just sayin. This can be done for way less than 5k.

damn i should be doing this, right, now.

I'm with Doug. I've played with this idea for a long time, but I've held off because of my concern for slippage. Since steppers running through Mach3 are entirely open loop, if the edge slips even a little bit, its garbage. I'd rather do some kind of closed-loop system using an optical sensor for edge position. But that goes way beyond my knowledge, and my patience/interest in learning.

I feel like feeding slippage could be fixed with multiple feeders if that makes sense. so if 1 slips, the edge will continue to feed through the other ones at the same rate. Sort of like 4 wheel drive on a car. If 1 wheel slips, the others probably wont. you could also make a custom(probably cnc) feeder wheel. The one wheel will be rubber and the other will have a custom shape that fits into the teeth, sort of like how gears fit together. The edge would be tightly sandwiched between the 2 rollers. Again, this all makes sense in my head, sorry if i didnt explain it well

double post

One of the big troubles with in feed is that using the three wheel system the angle at which the edge feeds in changes depending on the radius being bent. This (in my head anyway) seems to mean the infeed rollers would have to move to keep the edge feeding into the system straight (maybe not. I don't know. I have lacked sleep too many times trying to devise a CNC edge bender!)
The other method of bending (like a wire bender) allows the edge to feed in straight all the time.

On a side note to all the 3 wheel edge bender users out there. I was thinking about my bender today and thought hey if I can bend one edge with one set of grooves if I had 2 sets of grooves then as long as I kept both edges lined up then I could bend 2 edges at once. Even further If instead of the "L" shaped grooves for a single edge you had a "T" shaped groove you could feed 2 edges through at once with one facing up and the other facing down - result 2 edges bent the same but opposite at once! And then if you had 2 of these T shaped grooves then you could bend all your edges at once!.
Out of all of this I like the idea of bending the two edges opposite to each other at the same time because then you don't have any uneven strain on the ptex once you attach the edges.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... d2HcAyaG54
about 1:20 in

there is an optical encoder involved (circular piece on the right of the wheel marked with a 3). It looks like a 3 wheel bending setup operates downstream of this.
if you are smart enough to work it all out, it makes sense that you can also setup up a sand blaster upstream of the whole thing too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMtEVDG4K54
this one slipped past me somehow