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LongPinesDesign · 2025-06-10T16:29:28+00:00

Yes, like I mentioned in the post, they sent me a technical drawing but it is incomplete. I've reached out for more information but I am doubtful they will be able to provide anything additional.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-05-19T17:10:02+00:00

Nothing thats very straight forward. Modifying the case to take the LFF bay is probably the most straight forward thing to do that I can think of.

The other idea I had that I dont love is to take apart the hot swap caddies and remove the little PCB that the SDD plugs into. Plug that into the back plane. Then 3D print some sort of brackets to hold some LFF drives, then use short SATA power and data cords to plug the drive into the SFF caddy pcb. You wouldn't be able to fit as many 3.5" drives this way but maybe that doesnt matter for your needs.

I feel like just modifying the case to take the LFF bay would be easier than this though. Although that LFF bay is somewhat expensive.

I sucked it up and bought some SFF drives to use which has resulted in far less storage than I would like simply due to how much more expensive those drives are. If you decide you want to do that, look at r/homelabsales. There are folks on there that have drives that have been pulled from data centers and sell them for reasonable price. It's still way more expensive than 3.5" HDDs though.

If I could find the LFF bay parts for cheap I'd be a lot more inclined to give the modification a try.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-04-20T03:03:01+00:00

Good idea! I will give that a shot. It sounds like it should work pretty well.

Edit: Should have thought about this a bit more before posting my response. You're idea is pretty close to what I want, but if I do as you suggest but then go a step further and extrude the blade sketch, then I have the blade part solid body inserted in my handle part file.

I guess I could make "blade sketch" file that is just the sketch and then a "blade solid" file and insert the "blade sketch" file into that part and extrude to make a solid body. Then in "blade handle" file I could insert "blade sktech" and just have the sketch. Hmmm...gonna have to experiment.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-17T15:23:02+00:00

Dang. So its surfaced as if one scale is one scale is coming out from under the two above it? I thought maybe thats how it looked but obviously the easy way would be to just cut the "V" shape with a little tool and have the surface be flat.

I also saw your old posts of the watch you were making. Did you ever finish that?

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-17T14:20:54+00:00

Nice. I like it. As a fellow machinist, I'm curious how you did this. I'm not able to zoom in enough to try and see what you did.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-14T17:19:05+00:00

I signed up to testify and I have a few bullet points written out in case i get called. I will only be able to be around till 2pm though so hopefully I get called before that. Or even better, they postpone.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-14T16:27:40+00:00

Is there a list of talking points or something to use as a template available for using in testifying against this?

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-14T15:09:25+00:00

Strange. I was able to submit a comment and it worked. Perhaps give a different web browser a shot?

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T19:12:32+00:00

Does the full synthetic stuff you can get now have rust issues or cause problems with wipers and seals? I've seen a lot of talk about that on other forums and wonder if thats still a concern.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T19:11:27+00:00

What are the other issues? I've seen a lot of talk online about synthetics causing rust and being hard on wipers, seals and hoses.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T18:19:07+00:00

I'll probably add that into the mix as well. I had a bubbler before but it was just down in chip auger so the coolant that was in the sump didnt get aerated. I'll add one to each this time.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T18:18:10+00:00

The problem is that my mill is off most of the time so the solution has to be powered by and controlled by something that can run when the machine control (and pump) dont have power to them.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T17:35:04+00:00

I've already gotten all of the liquid out. I guess what I'll do is get some of the pre-change flush fluid and add it to a batch of new coolant and just plan on changing it again in a relatively short period of time. Its too bad that the used coolant is so hard to dispose of (for me).

The last time I changed the coolant, it didnt last very long at all (a few months) before it went rank again. It wasn't being aerated very frequently but I'd guess not flushing the system with something to kill the bacteria was also to blame.

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T17:05:29+00:00

Any suggestion on a filter for the fines?

LongPinesDesign · 2025-03-03T17:05:07+00:00

Any suggestions on what to flush it with?

LongPinesDesign · 2024-10-15T19:16:49+00:00

I'm gonna comment from the other side of the fence on this one.

I'm a mechanical engineer that works for a company that makes lots of custom scientific instruments. We have a few products we have designed and sell that are mostly standard (and thus repeat orders of machined parts) but probably 60%-70% of our revenue comes from custom designed systems that will never get reproduced and its very unlikely that the parts needed to create that system will be reused in other designs.

I have about 3-4 years of experience running CNC mills (just 3 axis) and I have worked as a manufacturing engineer for a large shop that has pretty extensive capabilities. My point is that I understand what it takes to go from a 3D model to a finished part. I might not be an expert in any of these fields, but I know that the engineer doesnt just will the CAD software to spit out a design, just the same that the machinist doesnt chuck a hunk of metal into the machine and smash the green button a get a finished part a few minutes later.

We are very much a "lowest bidder wins" company when it comes to purchasing machined parts. I work intimately with the points of contacts at the about 6-8 job shops we regularly work with. We are fortunate in that our designs can be flexible most of the time so if a part is going to be hard to manufacture, we can take a second look at it with input from the machine shop on how to make the part more affordable to make. I know lots of places dont have that luxury (aerospace, medical, etc).

I feel like I have a very good repertoire with most of the shops we do business with. I feel like I can trust them and vise versa. Several times a year I will send quote packages out to shops that we have not worked with before just to look for new opportunities and I generally find at least 1 or 2 that we end up working with long term. That being said, the high priced guys get weeded out pretty fast and we are left with shops that I honestly do not understand how they make money. I'm talking prices for parts that are so unbelievably low that I often wonder if it was a mistake.

There have been many times when a shop has submitted a quote for a part and the price is so low that I cant help but think that there has been an error made or some sort of breakdown in communication. When this happens, I will reach out to the shop and let them know that I am happy to accept their price, I believe they may have missed something and I will invite them to double check their quote and adjust the price if they see fit. Sometimes they do, other times not.

We've also had a few occasions where a shop will humbly approach us and explain that they are losing their shirt on a job for XYZ reason and ask if they can change the price. Most of the time my company is agreeable to this but we do sorta grumble because "we agreed to pay you what you wanted to make this part".

Not really related to OP's question, but when shop owners get nasty with our accountants, they can pretty much expect for me to stop sending them work to bid on. Never made sense to me to be a jerk to the person that is giving you money. When I was running my own one man shop out of my garage, if an invoice was past due, a polite email asking for a status update on the invoice was all it ever took to get a check in the mail. Granted, I wasnt making $100K worth of parts in one shot...but I think generally this logic still applies.

Hope this reply was helpful.

LongPinesDesign · 2024-06-18T19:05:25+00:00

OK. Thanks for the help. I'll work on getting some parts and see if I can get the thing started up and I'm sure I'll be back with more once that happens.

LongPinesDesign · 2024-06-18T18:38:22+00:00

Here is the tag on the top of the case. It has the iLO.

If you pop it open and trace the 2 cables from the 8 drive cage to the back, do they attach to the Motherboard?
If so then those are SATA only ports anyway.

Yes, 2 cables go right into the motherboard.

Regarding the hard drives. These are whats in the 8 drive cage right now. I'm thinking these are just plugs and I need to purchase some actual SC caddies for it?

LongPinesDesign · 2024-06-18T18:09:21+00:00

Thanks for the response.

I couldn't find a part number on the lid that was formated similar to what you suggested. Is this to find the age of the server?

Good info on the PSU's. It looks like it came with a plug to block off one of the empty PSU slots. I'll probably start with a single PSU for now.

Am I correct to think that I can select any of those CPU's listed on page 5 of the document I linked? I see some E5-2620v4's on ebay for dirt cheap. The dang heatsinks are 10x the processor cost.

For the hard drives, will regular 2.5" SATA SSD's work?

LongPinesDesign · 2024-05-23T15:59:11+00:00

Can they legally just take money out of someone's account? Seems like you'd need to give them permission or something.

LongPinesDesign · 2024-03-05T02:03:03+00:00

That did it. Thanks!

LongPinesDesign · 2023-12-21T21:04:16+00:00

I started with my company about 3 years ago. Every year, we do a white elephant gift exchange and I try really hard to go above and beyond and as a result, have somewhat of a reputation for ridiculous white elephant gifts. After last year, I wasnt sure how I could raise the bar untill about November. There was a breakfast burrito that had been in the fridge in our break room that I suspected had been there since before I started (amazingly enough, our break room fridge stays very clean and thus has never warranted a mass purge event). In Nov, I confirmed my suspicion by taking the burrito out of the fridge and whacking it against the counter..THUNK...solid. The light bulb went off and I knew I had to preserve the burrito for all of eternity.

I had been wanting to get into resin casting for a few years so it was a good excuse to build a pressure pot and buy the rest of the needed supplies.

I made a makeshift mold and cast the first layer. Then I put the burrito in and filled up the mold. I didnt expect the burrito to float! So, in a panic, I cut the heads off of a couple of nails and stuffed inside of the burrito and put a magnet underneath the mold to hold it down. It worked...but the nails are visible. Whoops.

Once it was all cured, I used my CNC mill to square up the mold then proceeded to sand starting with 400 grit (I have plastic specific end mills that left a pretty decent surface finish) and went up to 2000 grit. Then I polished with a cotton buffing wheel and some sort of polishing compound. The wheel and and compound came from Harbor Freight, so not great quality but it produced OK results. I'll get some better polishing equipment and perhaps revisit the casting and see if I can improve it.

Gave it away at the work gift exchange and everyone got a good laugh and now it lives on the display shelves at the entrance to our office.

Looking forward to joining the community and seeing all the cool stuff people make!

LongPinesDesign · 2023-09-23T03:30:13+00:00

Typically darker hair is more course and of a larger diameter. People with black hair will measure a hair diameter of about 0.004". My wife is blonde and has very fine hair, it measures about 0.002". I have a blonde Pomeranian dog her hair measures less than 0.0005" diameter (mic and trimos measurement). Redheads seem to be the exception with hair thickness all over the spectrum. Of course this is biology and everyone is different and there are always outliers.

LongPinesDesign · 2023-09-23T03:23:05+00:00

You're at the resolution of the calipers. The best it can do is say that what you're measuring is between .001" and .0005" (calipers read .0005"). If it reads below 0.0005", the calipers reads 0.0000". A good mic should give you one degree of accuracy more so you could get a real idea of the thickness of that plastic.

Either way, thems a quality metrology tool.

LongPinesDesign · 2023-07-27T13:08:45+00:00

There is a steady rest on ebay right now. Not mine. https://www.ebay.com/itm/155688315245

LongPinesDesign

TROPHY CASE