Starborne Works

Last week, for the second time in several months, I found myself soldering a Wacom tablet. They’ve very nicely made items, but I suppose it’s no surprises the only parts that wear out are the mechanical ones. In these cases, the USB cables.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but the cable Wacom use seems rather cheap. It’s very thin and tightly bound inside. And it always breaks internally right at the point where it enters the tablet casing. There is some strain relief there, but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

The fix is fairly simple: Cut off a few inches of the cable and solder it back together. Or if you can fit a heavier duty cable in, replace the cable entirely. I also hot-glue it in place as much as possible to provide extra strain relief to the cable.

I feel I should let everyone know about a design quirk that almost scuppered the last repair however.

It was a repair as a favour for a friend on a big Intuos 1, GD model. The cable connects conveniently close to where it leave the casing so there was no awkward snaking of wires through it to deal with, unlike the Graphire 3 I fixed last time.
The point of note though is the foil flap stuck to the inside of the upper surface. It’s there as a shield.
After the fix and it was all reassembled, the tablet wouldn’t work. At one point it tripped the safety on my 2.5Amp powered hub!
Wires were re-soldered several times, until we finally took to plugging it in and re-assembling it “live”. The moment the upper surface went in place it stopped responding. It’s about then we realised the foil flap doesn’t just sit on top of the electronics, it wraps around behind it too! The inner surface of the flap is insulated, the outside is not. We were lucky not to fry it.
Slipped it under the board, holding the upper surface open before easing it all into place, and it all worked fine. Phew!

So for anyone else repairing a Wacom tablet; watch where you put your foil flaps.

So I told a lot of folk back at Confuzzled that I’d soon have a webshop up and running. And I still will.
I’ve been taking some time experimenting with differing categories as well as recruiting a few artists to allow me to sell their prints through the shop as well. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship I feel. Or rather, I hope it will be!

Creating the shop has turned into an opportunity for me to strip-down and rebuild a lot of other things. A lot of elements of the way I’ve done things have been thrown together on the fly out of necessity. Stopping for shop-building has left me in a position to remake with lessons learnt. The first of those has been new moulds for the claws. The claws themselves will remain the same, but the new moulds should be easier to use and require less hand finishing on the claws they produce, speeding up my turnaround time.

I’ve got a nice new workbench I’ve been making from a very heavy-duty kitchen tabletop and other salvaged wood. I’ve been adapting it to purpose, so again giving me more workspace and one that’s better to use.

I’ve also been working on a much improved vacuum chamber for better and faster degassing of the resins in greater quantities at once. Having it internally lit with a loading caddy will be extremely useful to me. As will putting in a baffle so things don’t get knocked around when going Up-To-Air again.

I’m also currently researching and doing costings on how viable it is for me to build a 4+ axis milling machine. I’ve mentioned the possible uses of this to a few people, but I’ll keep quiet on that on here for the time being. 😉
Either way, the prototype’s going to be an interesting one.

In the meantime, I’ll see about giving a few updates on interesting little scrap-builds and other projects.