This week was mostly focused on redesigning the shells for the Scopes, and starting to put into place what we'll need to get them ready to vacuum form.

But a quick update on the bearing blocks. We got a hold of a sheer hog and were able to bore out the hole for the vertical axle.

That puts us in a place now where we can really start busting these blocks out with just a few operations on the Tormach. One block down, four more to go.

Back to the design side of things... I started off doing a rough layout of the yoke, blocks and the internal components, which helped me get a good sense of scale for how to approach this new shell design.

Now that I'm happy with the shape of the shell, I split the model into two sides and 3D printed some scale positives that I can use to do a pull on the small vacuum former over at Crash Space. It'll be good to follow the process from beginning to end before we make the full size positive on the ShopBot.

We're also going to try to build a simple vacuum former in-house. Steve had already started building one a while back that he never finished, but thankfully his heating element and vacuum bed were still kicking around Crash.

We should be able to fabricate the stand that holds the bed and heater fairly quickly on the ShopBot. Luckily there's lots of awesome open source DIY versions for inspiration. Since the bed is 24"x24" that should be more than enough room to fabricate as many Perceptoscope shells as we'll need.