Hi everyone, it's time for this year's Maker's Challenge
you might remember last year, Theo Kellison challenged 14 rockhounds to make
things out of their finds
last year I made beads from my wife's Pandora bracelet
and this year I was having a hard time coming up with an idea
so I contacted Thomas from 99 Rockhounding
and he's pretty artistic and creative, and I said hey, what should I make for this
thing, so he said why don't you try making an oloid?
so I then looked up what an oloid was, because I had no idea
and it's this oddly shaped object that doesn't look like it would roll, but
it actually rolls really nicely
so
it's definitely going to be a challenge, I don't know if I can pull this off, but
I'm going to try
so the first thing I need to do, and this is going to be a challenge in itself,
is just to make a rectangular prism, or a box shape out of a rock
and I need it to be like maybe 4 inches long and
on the end it's square and a little bit smaller than 4 inches
so
I was looking around for a rock, and I couldn't really find much that was big
enough to cut that big of a rectangular prism out of, but I found this one
it's a- it's a pretty green rock
you can see I've already cut it, this has been sitting underneath my saw for years
I don't remember even where I got it, but I cut around here with an angle grinder
and then I put a chisel in and broke it the rest of the way, that's why it's smooth
around the outside and broken on the inside
so, I think I can get a pretty big rock out of this
so what I'm going to do is put it in my saw, the reason I cut it is because this
wouldn't fit in my saw without cutting it
my saw is a 10-inch saw, but it'll only hold a rock that's 3 and a half inches tall
so I'm going to put it in like this, I'm going to take a slice off one side this way
and then I'm going to turn it and take a slice off this way
and that will give me a 90 degree angle there to start with
but then it's really hard to cut a parallel cut, you have to put it in the saw just
exactly right and it's just eyeballing it
so, I don't think I'm going to be able to do that on that saw, so I've got an idea
for doing it on the inside
so let me get those first two cuts done, and then we'll see what I can do about
the other cuts
so wish me luck
I've got my first two cuts made, and unfortunately it's off just a little bit,
it's not exactly 90 degrees, it's- it's a little bit more than that
so I don't know if I'll have to fix that later or not, I'm going to kind of play
it by ear as I go
but for right now, I'm going to do my next cuts on this Frantom saw
this has a little
fence over here, this moves in and out maybe
but it's really short, and I just don't know with it being that short if I'm going
to be able to keep the same width all the way along, so instead
I just clamped on a board here
and I'm going to run the rock along like this to make my next cut
this also has this vice on it
so this flips down, and there's a cable over here
and the idea is you put a weight on the end of the cable and that drags the rock
through as it cuts. I've never been able to get this to work very well, it always
rides up on the blade as it approaches the blade, it kind of picks up
so if I use it, I won't use the weight, I'll just be pushing the vice through with
my hand, so I might be doing
the end cuts that way
this actually isn't quite this long, those are just there for reference
so, I'm going to make that cut and then
then we'll see about making the other cuts
(saw whirring)
alright, I worked on this for a couple hours last night, and I can't say it's
going too great
we'll see if I can make this happen, but
these two corners are sort of square
and then, this is, if you look at the end here, it's just way out of wack, there's
nothing that's completely square on this
so I tried really hard to use my little fence and played around with different
things with that saw, but I think I'm going to try my trim saw and if worse comes
to worst, I'll use a flat lap and just try to grind all that off, but that's going
to take forever
and that's just going to get this side and this side parallel, then I've got to go
back and square some more stuff up
it's much longer than it needs to be, so I'm going to be cutting some off there too
it's a good thing, because you can probably see how out of square that end is
alright, so I will check back in in a little bit when I get some more stuff done
alright, I have it reasonably squared up
the flat lap ended up being kind of useless it would've literally taken me forever to
do it on there, I cut a little bit more on the saw, and then mostly I just ground
it on the first wheel of my cab machine
so
the next thing I've done here is marked this up, I'm actually following a youtube
video where somebody made these out of wood
but what I did is, I made a 60 degree angle down on the bottom here, so right in the
middle that's 60 degrees
and drew a half circle up on this side
and then on the other side, you do it upside down
so this side
and this side match
and this side
and this side match
so the next thing I'm going to do is cut out these circles, so I'm going to
cut this off, just this corner off on my saw
and then I'm going to go over to the cab machine and just round it off the best
I can
that's the plan anyhow
(saw whirring)
(wheel grinding)
my confidence level on this project's been fluctuating wildly
one minute I think, oh, this is going to be no problem, and then next minute
I think, oh, I'm not going to be able to do this
I didn't show you this, but the first thing I did when I was cutting off the corners for
these circles here
I missed and cut right into the circle so I redrew the circles on the opposite
sides, because this is all going to get cut off anyhow
so, I had to redraw everything, so that was another 20 minutes
(laughs)
and then
then I'm- I'm pretty happy with this step, I've got the circles cut nicely, I think
everything looks pretty good there, it's not perfect but it's not too bad
now I've run into another little problem
I need to re-draw, let me get a good side here
I need to redraw these lines
so
remember there was a - up at the top here there's supposed to be a 60 degree angle
so I thought, well this is no problem, I'll get a piece of cardboard
and I'll line it up along there
and then I'll wrap it around
but you see, I completely miss like up there where it should be
so I thought, well shoot, what do I do now
so I thought, oh well that's easy, I'll just go from here up to there
with the cardboard, so I put it on the corner here
and I go up there
and I'm way off on that angle that I drew before, so that's not right
then I figured
if you take a ruler
and you line it up along there and you kind of eyeball it across there
that's where I want it to be
and I can't do that by wrapping anything around there, and I can't draw a straight
line by rocking the ruler back and forth, so I was kind of stuck
so I tried on this side, to hold the ruler in the right spot, and I eyeballed it
and I just took a - so I'm looking at it like this
and I just took a marker and tried to mark it, but it's all
it's all crooked and kind of horrible
the problem here is that I'm not just cutting this off on a saw, if this was wood
I'd just cut this, I'd make some sort of a jig, I'd just cut straight across there
and I'd be all set
but I'm trying to cut this roughly with a saw
because I can't cut that accurately with my rock saw, I've found
so I get it roughly cut that way, then I'm taking it over on my cab machine that has
round wheels on it, and I'm trying to make a flat surface with round wheels
so it's- it's all kind of complicated
so
I just remembered that I have this laser level
so I think what I'm going to do
I'm going to hold the laser level
I don't know how I'm going to hold it exactly, but you see
how I'm getting the right line right about there?
so I'm not going to film this, because it's going to be hard enough just to get it all
clamped together, so if I can get it held steady like that I'll just draw along that
line
I lied a little bit, I'm going to show you my setup
I just put a clamp there, there's the top part
it does fade out a little bit here, but this has a thing where I can change the
angle on the top, just dial this little wheel, so
I just dialed it until it lined up about right
somewhere around there
and now I'm just going to trace that line
well that worked out pretty well
I'm not unhappy with that
the same thing down here
so I need to cut these off here
and here
and that's going to involve cutting with my saw first
and getting somewhat close, and then I'm going to finish it up over on the cab machine
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can
(saw whirring)
(wheel grinding)
alright, so here's where we're at, I got two of those cuts done, came out okay
looks pretty flat, I think you can see on both sides, this one's maybe a little bit
wonky, but not too horrible I hope
so
now I need to cut
these off
which presents a little bit of a problem, so as I set it on the saw table like this,
it's going to want to tip back like this, and I want it up like that
so I'm going to take one of these pieces that I cut off
and I'm going to tape it on there, I'm just going to wrap some masking tape
around there
and it should leave it fairly level as I'm pushing it through the saw, I hope
(saw whirring)
(wheel grinding)
alright, it's coming along pretty nicely here
I did a little more reading on this, and one site had a pronunciation guide, and
it said it's pronounced "oh-loh-weed"
instead of "oh-loyd", like I said, so
not sure how accurate that is, since there was only one site that had a pronunciation
guide, but that's what I read
this was invented, or discovered, or whatever you want to say, by a
German mathematician sculptor by the name of Paul Schatz
and some sites call him Swiss, one place said that he was born in Germany
and he lived the second half of his life in Switzerland
so, that's I think where the confusion comes from there
anyhow, the next thing I have to do is round off these edges
so they come to a point along there,
so this will be like sharp
and then on the bottom part
I've got to do the same thing, I'm going to round these off to come to a point here
and over here
the part that's got me a little bit concerned is the transition, so this is going to be
sharp
and this is going to be sharp down here
but I'm not really sure what happens in the middle, so I guess I'll just sort of
taper it in and
meld it together the best I can, so we'll see what happens
off to the cab machine
(wheel grinding)
thought I'd stop and show you what I've been doing
so, I'm focusing on this line, because it has to come to a point right along here
so I'm getting closer, just round this down
and I'll do like this side, then I'll flip it around and do this side
and then I flip it over and do this side and this side
and then there's like 4 more pieces over here that I have to hit
so I'm working on them all equally, just so can kind of see how it all fits together
just taking my time and going around slowly
well back to work!
(wheel grinding)
okay, I've got it all finished, but before I show it to you, let me just show you this
little model I made to help explain this shape a little bit better
so as you can see, it's two circles that intersect one another, but one's turned
90 degrees to the other
and the edge of the black circle is at the center of the white circle and vice versa
so if you remember at the beginning, I started with a block of stone that was square
at the end
so, this diameter and this diameter are the same, so that's where you get
your square
and then that- the length of the side of the square, or the diameter of the circle
is here, plus another half
so that's why it has to be one and a half times longer than the side length of the
square on the end
so then picture this whole thing covered with
like a fabric or something, or shrink wrap
so if there was a covering over all of it that was stretched tight, it would go
straight from one part to the other, so from here to here would be straight
any way you'd look at it, it would go straight from here to whatever the
highest edge is over here
so that's the way I tried to make mine. So here's my finished product
you can see the circle on the top
and then if I turn them both 90 degrees
there's the circle on the bottom
and if you look at this going this way when I was grinding it
I was just trying to make this straight, I was just eyeballing right across here and
trying to make this as straight as I could
probably not perfect, but it's pretty close
so
from the top of this to the edge here
straight line
so the idea is this is supposed to roll in a really cool way, so let's try this one
first this board I have down here is tipped up on the right edge
and it's supposed to roll in a straight line
mine does not always roll in a straight line
it tends to curve a little bit, so I don't know if I
have it a little lopsided, perfectly possible that I do
but it still looks kind of cool rolling
turn it around this way see if it goes to the right now
it's right
still going to the left, so
it might just be my board's crooked
although the paper one went pretty well
remember, this is The Maker's Challenge, so there's 13 other videos to see from other
creators
I'll leave a playlist here, plus a link to the video that I did last year where I made
beads for my wife's Pandora bracelet
thanks for watching, see you next time