Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Extra-Fancy Gaff Tape Dispenser”.
This week, we’re gon na build something completely ridiculous. It’S a fancy tape dispenser, but for my favorite kind of tape, gaffers tape, you see a few years ago, Laura Kampf, built a tape dispenser for duct tape. They look like one of those disposable scotch tape rolls but for duct tape, and it was made out of steel. It looked awesome and I absolutely loved that project.
It heavily inspired this one, but in my case I wanted it to look like one of those classy desktop tape dispensers using my favorite combination of woods, maple and walnut. I knew I’d be using my x-carve to keep everything as accurate as possible. So I started doing my design in fusion 360, first, getting the critical dimensions of a gaff tape, roll and then creating the spindle and then the overall wooden base.
The design has four layers that are all sandwiched together: maple forming the outer two layers and walnut. As the center spacers, this dispenser is designed for a two inch wide roll. You can easily scale to fit any width you’d like I also added holes to glue in some alignment pins to help with the assembly for the cam setup. I start by drilling holes for the guide, pins and then go on to the two pocket operations. The first one is for the cradle that the spindle pin rests in and the second operation hollows at the cavity for the inside of the dispenser I like to avoid changing bits in a single part. If I can help it, but that meant committing to one-eighth inch bit to drill the holes for the guide pins as a result, I was in for a pretty long milling time.
I’M not sure if the guide pins are really all that necessary as long as you’re. Careful in your glue up – and if I design this over again, my pins would be 1/4 inch wooden dowels, so that then I could use the same size bit to reduce my milling time. Finally, I used a contour cut for the outer shape. Fortunately, the walnut pieces could be handled just a drilling operation and a contour cut, so there are much shorter tool paths.
I broke all of my stock down to the same size, five and a half inches by ten inches and then clamp them down to the machine to let it get to work. One thing I’d learned, while cutting the maple pieces and set up the toolpath see, is a conventional milling direction, but this ended up breaking off chips that were over an inch long when milling horizontally. Those chips were long enough to clog my dust extraction system a few times, but the problem went away when to switch to a climb milling tool path. With everything cut out, it was time to start assembling.
I trimmed down some 1/8 inch steel rod into two inch lengths to work as the guide pins and then did my glue up once I had to solid piece, I sanded all the layers flushed to each other and then added a bit of a roundover to all The exposed corners I added a few layers of danish oil, then set the base aside to dry. While I worked on the spindle, I was eager to see the project completed so for the spindle shape I just 3d printed it. The spindle rod was a short length of 1/8 inch steel. They took some time to sand down the surface, to remove the mill scale and give it a nice finish before punching it through. The spindle last part to add is the blade. I heard plenty of advice he’s in a hacksaw blade to do this, but I had this scrap piece of 2-inch wide steel, so I just used that giving it a 45 degree bevel on one side and cutting it square.
On the other, I had a to drill holes to secure it into place and then countersunk them, so you wouldn’t see the screw heads through the tape. Alright, guys thanks for sticking around to see how this turned out, I’m super happy with it. I can’t wait to have this thing sitting on my desk for years to come, ready to dispense, gaff tape whenever I need it. Thanks for watching we’ll see you next time.
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