Making a Multi Drive

Making a Multi Drive

Hello everyone!

First off, a huge thank you to you all for backing!

The Steel Prototype…What Dis? 

After we've done our early designs, 3D printed a bunch of variations and are nearing the final design, but before we approach manufactures, we make a final working prototype out of mild steel. This allows us to get a real world take on how the product will work and also spot manufacturing issues, like those pesky right-angled holes. 

Since this can be a really interesting process to see each part machined by hand, we recorded 'The Making Of Multi Driver' and have edited it down from 5 days (or 40 hours) of turning, milling, filing and fitting into 13 minutes, so you can enjoy the Multi Drive build supercut!

The real thing will be made on a CNC machine whereas this is all made the traditional way, manually measuring and gauging each part to drawings.

I hope you enjoy this as much as we did making it!

Inside the Shed

So, if you've just watched that and are thinking "what the heck have I just seen?!", here's some more info:

All machined in the MetMo shed by Geoff, who has over 40 years experience in mechanical design and engineering, this is the first look at the Multi Drive. Geoff started out as a machinist and is a dedicated and award winning model engineer in his spare time (hence the random parts of steam locomotive in the background of these shots). He has been with us since the beginning bringing these projects to life, and he often gets stuck into fixing or machining any parts that are damaged or need tweaking during production. 

On this project we went through a lot more rounds of prototypes and samples than we normally do, so this was the 3rd metal sample we made and the second video. Both of those were made of brass and a slightly different design, but each time we finished one and started using it, it was clear it was behaving so differently from our 3D printed prototypes and just wasn't good enough. 

All this practice got us pretty fast at turning out metal samples, so in this final version not too much went wrong in the build; a rare event indeed! 

We didn't have a broaching tool or equipment, so the set up for making the hexagon hole in the end of the chuck is somewhat jerry rigged with a custom ground tool and set up in a fixed spindle on the milling machine. 

The blade bits were sampled using a sintered 3D printed metal part since the geometry was going to be way too difficult to machine by hand.

Since making this version, we have made some other refinements around the collet area, so it locks better and won’t come undone unintentionally. Now the collet locks into the main handle nice and securely and we'll show some more details in an upcoming blog post about how all that works. 

I hope you've found all of this interesting and it has hopefully given some insight into how we develop and make things of intrigue at MetMo!

That’s all for now, hope you enjoy watching a Multi Drive come to life!

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