Alan Mackenzie's Blog

Working on the scanner top panel.

Cutting some plywood strips for the edges of top phone panel.

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Another day and back again to have another go at cutting another piece of Acrylic.

Yay… a nice clean, clear and unmarked piece of ‘Acrylic glass’ that will sit on top of the negative to stop it curling. This time I trimmed off two edges of the sheet to get away from where air and moisture had penetrated the edges drying out the adhesive backing. Same again hair dryer and where needed Tree Tree Oil. This time for the final clean I used a Microfibre cloth!

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Making the scanner frame holder that will contain the actual negative.

Measure, mark and drill corner holes to insert the scroll saw blade.

With the blade passed through one of the corner holes amd mounted on the top arm we can start cutting.

With that done pull forward the rear tension lever, press down on the blade holder to release the blade and remove the work piece.

I cut a piece of Acrylic from A4 sheet to fit the scanner frame window. The moment you put a negative on the tablet screen it will start to curl due to the heat generated running the Lightbox app.
However… we have a problem! The Acrylic sheet was bought a few years ago and the backing has dried out making it very hard to remove. After trying for one hour what’s left will not come off – bugger.

Went inside and manged to remove the last bit with Tee Tree Oil.

I’ll be back…

Start making the scanner box.

The boards are tongue & groove and we don’t want the groove on the bottom boards so trimmed them off on the 8″ sliding mitre saw and here we are planning the bottom edges and checking they are all the same width.

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The scanner box will have rectangular slots on either side. The sliding carrier will be inserted from the right side – something like that.

Start with some scrap 3mm MDF.

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Making a start building the box with no planning or sketch drawing. I figure however it turns out it needs a base so let’s jump in without dipping a toe.

Found a scrap of MDF that will just be large enough.

Base dimensions are slightly oversize to the Lenovo tablet.

Cordless ALDI Workzone sliding mitre saw not squared up.

Only need to cut one side and one end.

To continue I need to cut the rest of the panels from a sheet of MDF but wait what do we have here?

Chinese Fir timber from a dog kennel put out last year during hard rubbish collection that I collected 🙂

Those lounge & groove planks will do the job – nicely.

Looks like IKEA flat pack. Cut everything to size, two planks are about 120mm wide. The scanning focal length of the Samsung J7 Pro phone camera is around 100mm so looking good.

I’ll be back…

A few years ago most of our family did the DNA Kit thing with Ancestry_com. When the results came back there was lots of fun and laughter. Well I’m back now (last month) doing the full thing, The Mackenzie Tree is well established and growing nicely. Inevitably this leads to searching for family photos, no issues there everything is stored in one particular spot. I also found another shoebox (OXFORD SHOES) at the bottom of the wall unit in my study.

My dad’s shoebox crammed full with packets of negatives (no photos) from 70 plus years ago!

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