Just returned from a 500 mile round trip and still all is performing well. Your responses have been sufficient to warrant tooling up for moulded polyurethane inserts and design work is underway. Thanks everybody for your confidence. My summers are busy with music exhibitions etc. so it may be a few months before they are ready but I will get production of a batch of kits started immediately.
Phil,
I've read your blog several times and have paid close attention to the new urethane inserts.
I know that on the ones you have, you had to hand cut/form them. If you had a cad drawing of the profile in .dxf, you might want to look up your local fab shop that has a water jet. We have an OMAX that we use to cut urethane nest tooling for the plastics blown bottle industry. We cast the nests from liquid urethane and then do our flash profile cut with the water jet. We have a .5" thick aluminium back and we cut through that and then on through up to 4" of urethane.
Our OMAX also had what they call a "tilt-a-jet" head. This allows up to 9 degrees of jet path tilt. As anyone knows that's ever cut thicker metal with a cutting torch, the torch tends to lag behind on the thicker metal. The water jet does the same thing and we can adjust the head angle to compensate for it.
I'm not sure, but the rubber rods look to be around 100mm long. This should be well within the range of most water jets.
Rather than making a mold and messing with the mixing etc, maybe having them cut from a sheet of urethane would be more cost effective for you.
At worst, spend a little time and look into it.
Keep up the great work on the M3W, great reading!
