3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

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Artfldgr
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3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by Artfldgr »

3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner


anyone other than myself realize that you can make a faceting machine from a hard drive?
just wondering...

[just as they made laser burners for small items and cnc work out of blue tooth dvd drive heads]

to do it well you would need to mount the drive against the system you use for holding and turning the gem
at the very least though, make a nice stone back flat polisher for those with curved cab machines
its electrical, and i am proposing water, so, if you dont know what your doing, learn first :)
Last edited by PinkDiamond on Sun Apr 15, 2018 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Edited by Pink to embed video
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by PinkDiamond »

Cool, Art! I had heard they could be made into mini laps, but never saw one uncovered and used in such a manner. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. Way cool, and I embedded it for you. :)
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by rocks2dust »

Interesting. I think I'd want to replace the glass disc with something less prone to exploding (maybe an old CD would fit?). If one could figure out the water problem, there are massive numbers of these old drives out there for the taking (so many are being dumped in favor of solid state drives). One could probably make a cheap mini-faceter with one drive permanently dedicated to each grit step - just move the mast from one to the next, as is done with cabbing wheels.

Those neodymium magnets can certainly also be used to flotation-test gems for magnetism.
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Artfldgr
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by Artfldgr »

the DVD is using lexan, and you would have to do a lot of work to make that work

this on the the other hand goes at a good speed (over 5000rpm), with a ULTRAFLAT aluminum or glass platter...
a tiny bit of mineral oil, diamond dust and voila... your faceting small stones on a surface so flat you can use it as a mirror in a telescope

Platters are typically made using an aluminium or glass and ceramic substrate.
As of 2015, laptop hard drive platters are made from glass while aluminum platters are often found in desktop computers
i have old ones with aluminum platters which are not much different than the soft copper platters of a faceting base


anyway, "we are never so inventive as when we invent reasons to say NO"
we will even event a no for technology that exists...

if you can glue paper onto the disk and take it off and use the machine till the bearings go, you have a way to do things you didnt before
Image

HARD DRIVE (HDD) Diamond Grinder Conversion
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg6qHqzWC2U[/youtube]

take a look at this hack.
the point is you get a super flat non vibrational motor that runs on 5volts with mounts..
you can find some examples if you read slovak or russian as a way to do things without access to things
7,200 RPM Hard Drive Sander/Grinder - DIY Project
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE5F8n9lcwg[/youtube]

Power a hard drive motor without a speed controller
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6XVDd4eHIQ[/youtube]

tell you the truth... some really good glue, sandpaper a disk, glue on some leather, and you can use it to polish stones!!

I figure since you can get a hard disk for nothing sometimes, and power supply from trashed computer
one could build a tiny lapidary of sorts... would not be much different than the flat disks people use to cab
and if your doing opals (read soft), you can easily use sand papers to do most of the work by just changing them
water proofing isnt too hard either...

most motors are too "loose" in that tehy dont turn well enough to cut a stone becuase their loseness causes uneven pressure
you probably cant press as hard as a disk, but pressing isnt the point... pressing is about time, not work..

the hardest and i think really tough part is some way to hold the dop and turn it at the right angles consistently (and be adjustable)

ever see movies of professional diamond cutting machines...
almost none are done by hand any more

The Israel Diamond Technology Center (IDT)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mH0qh-OOj0[/youtube]


New diamond cut machine: Smile and double smile
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4_usT7uQGE[/youtube]

Full Automatic Gem Faceting Cutting Machine(Machine Update & Line Suggestion)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oloIWUQY8w[/youtube]
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by SwordfishMining »

Yeah those spindle bearings are not going to take much lateral load before wearing thin. I just saw some guy using dozens in server frames to use for Crypto currency mining. Personally, I like the idea of watching a hard drive being worked to death instead of wandering the junk world with its gold mine of recoverable information for the taking. I consider a used computer used up, and need properly buried, unless im buying it. LOL
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by PinkDiamond »

SwordfishMining wrote:I like the idea of watching a hard drive being worked to death instead of wandering the junk world with its gold mine of recoverable information for the taking.


Won't a really strong rare earth bar magnet run over the hard drive eliminate recoverable information from being retrieved? :?:
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by SwordfishMining »

I trust flame destruction best. Forensic computer recovery is a common act for law enforcement.
I'll jump over my shadow. https://www.virginvalleyopal.com"
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Artfldgr
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by Artfldgr »

I take them apart, and cut the disks for use in projects...
they are unparalleled for their flatness in every day life

i used one as the center flat in a telescope design i made up.. not that any one cares bout the odd things i do.
more like the way they compress the length of the lenses when doing camera

throw one in the car/boat/trailer.. why? well unless you know how to signal with a mirror...
61JbkCBFahL._SY450_.jpg

Image

hey moms... remember doctors when there wasnt these high falluting flashlights/torches?
well it works the same if your outside... like hunting.. fishing, and you need to see better..
Image
Granted, you dont need the heads strap... (no, duct tape is not good for this.. hair hair hair hurt hurt hurt)

there are other clever uses for such things...
some people generate power with the motors, complete waste..

would you believe there is an early internet FAQ with me on it famous for using CD or DVDs as diffraction gratings for laser work?
the old Laser FAQ from the 90s is gone.. you cant find it anymore... poof..

things like CD Rom Spectroscopes...
CDs as diffraction gratings
The distance between two neighbouring tracks is 1.6 micro-metres which is only several times the wavelength of visible light, thus it is too small to be seen in a simple microscope. One needs a professional quality instrument at 1000x magnification


we get a strong reflection from the grooved surface only in the direction sin(a) = l/D (or any multiple of l/D). Because this direction depends on the wavelength, it is possible to build spectroscopes with diffraction gratings. For the CD we know that D = 1.6µm, and we can compute the deflection angles (a) for each colour of the (first order) spectrum:


lightwavelengthcddvdspectrograph.png
lightwavelengthcddvdspectrograph.png (5.64 KiB) Viewed 2316 times


In a DVD the tracks are even closer together (D = 0.74µm), hence the deflection angles are much larger.

The accurate measurement of the angle allows to measure the wavelengths. We note that the angle increases almost linearly with wavelength. So we may estimate the wavelength of a colour or line simply by judging its distance to certain known colours, such as the orange Na D line at 590 nm, or the lines of Mercury: 579 and 577 (yellow), 546 (green), 436 (blue), and 405 (purple).

The "rainbows" you saw from the CD in the sunshine are the first order reflections (one wavelength path difference between neighbouring beams), in the centre there is the zero order image, and the fainter bows further out are the second-order spectra.


and

Limitations of CDs

Could one use CDs in professional spectroscopic instruments? No, not really. One can produce diffraction gratings with straight-line grooves and of much better optical quality using glass or metal as a base. And their inventor Henry A.Rowland in 1880 already produced gratings on precision curved surfaces which allowed to focus the spectra properly.

But apart from that small limitation, the optical quality of CDs and DVDs, which are designed to work with infrared lasers in your player, is very good, and one can obtain spectra of excellent quality and spectral resolution. And this can be done with any CD or DVD which had become useless because of a writing error ..


for some interesting details
http://www.nnin.org/sites/default/files ... INGS_0.pdf
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SwordfishMining
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Re: 3 Best ideas - what can be made from an old Hard drive (HDD) | Tools sharpner

Post by SwordfishMining »

Thanks. I've run into a lot of old forums and saved log chat rooms gone too over the years. Seems people have to want to pay for storage and there is no promise they will store your thoughts. "Parents" never forget tho. I have a feeling any new thing since the cloud will never truly be lost again. Until the sun burps and we lose the cloud. LOL
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