First Post: Introduction and Past Projects

Hello!

I'm Robert Reeve; this is my first blog post.

The first thing I'm going to do is to provide an introduction:

I'm an engineer; my M.S. degree is in Mechanical Engineering, my bachelor's degree was a dual B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Nuclear Engineering.  These are both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.  Most of my professional experience has been in manufacturing-related engineering, but I really miss the sorts of things we did RPI in the nuclear engineering courses.

When I say that I'm an engineer, I don't just mean that in the professional arena.  I would say that I am an engineer at work, at home....while sleeping...while daydreaming...everything; it's an obsession.  I think that a large number of people who are also engineers think about it in the same way; as a way of viewing the world rather than just a profession.  The desire to design things, to build them and see your own creations function, to take things apart in order to gain an understanding of their inner workings; these are habits that strive to take over brain capacity that would normally be dedicated to other things like....normal social interaction, haha.  Some of us manage to handle that balance better than others.

At any rate, here are some interesting pictures of things that I've done, or places that I've been, in the years before I started this blog:


 [ A project to automate a Bridgeport milling machine: ]

 [ Purchased a Lathe!: ]

[ Some late-night woodturning during finals week: ]

[ Urban exploring in New Britain, CT: ]

[ Home-made motor mounting and belt-tensioning system for my Unimat lathe: ]

[ Gear hobber project:  converting my Atlas lathe into a mechanical gear hobbing machine: ]

[ A special spring-collet that I made one day: ]

[ The new z-axis for my watchmaker's lathe (the Unimat): ]

[ A British food product, 'Bovril', supposedly invented for Napoleon for transporting beef to his troops in liquid form: ]

[ I'm calling this a 'knee' for my lathe; it's a home-made table and carriage which will be mounted on my lathe in order to use it like a sideways vertical milling machine.  For comparison, the stock z-axis for the lathe is on the right. ]

[ Some practice with the watchmakers' saw-blades.  I can produce letters equivalent in size to the text on a quarter, which is done by hand with a saw-frame and a blade. ]

 [ This is what the watchmakers' saw-blades look like under a microscope.  Notice the scale bars. ]