The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Finishing Touches

The engraving step for my home-built AR is complete. The logo I came up with:

and an overall shot of the finished rifle:

Why a cartoon cat? All of the major parts in my homebrew AR, except for the lower receiver that I finished, are DPMS parts. That is, the finished upper, and the parts kit in the lower are DPMS; the stock is a generic multi-position stock. DPMS has a fierce-looking panther as its logo, so I figured a not-so-fierce looking version of Mojo, our white cat, would be a nice touch. I originally was going to go with a name like "Moe's Firearms", but that takes up room and there's just not a lot of room there.

To create the logo, I found a cartoon called "how to draw a cat" and used the cat. Opened the .gif in my CAD program, traced it, saved it as a 2D .dxf file, imported that into the CAM program DeskCNC, created g-code and after a test on a piece of scrap brass, did the rifle lower. Took about 15 minutes at the overly cautious rate of 1/2 inch per minute engraving speed. As the French say, "wah-lah".