Welcome to my home page.

Kurt J Schaefer

Links relating directly to me:

• Backyard Foundry
• My First Steam Engine
• A little info about pop-pop steam boats
• HooverCraft(tm) Exploits
• The Pottery Page
• My Dream Car (I want to fix one of these BMW Isetta's up some day.) I also have some pictures of one done up to look like a penguin.
• CNC conversion of my Grizzly 8x18 lathe.
• Our new welding rig (48k jpg) and a shot of me useing it (10k jpeg).
• The robot I worked on with Simon Penny
• A picture of me with my friend Kate (17k jpeg)
• A picture of the house I used to live in (44k jpeg)
• Robotic scroll saw endeavors
• Image of my first attempt to machine a gear. I made it by casting a gear blank (well actually a cylindrical ingot, and then using my lathe to clean it up, and my mill to cut the teeth. The tooth form is created by a single point cutting tool that I ground to shape. It's far from a functional gear, but it was a fun first project on my new Sherline mill.
• I have a picture of the tool holder (17k jpg) that I made using my Sherline mill. It's part of a quick change tool system I'm making to fit on my 8x18 lathe. Cutting this tool holder out of a steel block with my little mill was a SLOW process. Definitely not for the timid, but I like the way it turned out. I'm learning! I almost felt like a real machinist when I drilled the holes for the clamping screws. I used an edge finder, center drilled the locations for the holes, and then went back and drilled them (all in the mill) going .586 inches between holes. There was a surprising amount of simple algebra involved!
• My father's account of his trip down the Mississippi on a raft that they built in 5 days in a campground in Minnesota. Note the cunning use of astro-turf!
• My Electric Bike Project

Coming Soon:

• Converting a small XY table into a CNC milling attachment for the lathe.
• Our cat C-ko
• The story of our move across the country.
• My father bicycle tourist extraordinaire.

Other links of interest:

• There is a link to a page about my Uncle's retirement.
• Info about robotics competitions is available at CMU's robotics faq.
• Hey what could be more fun than finding out what the newest and most happening infections are at the CDC.
• Want to buy things from the government? We call it "Defense Reutilization"
• Want to use the internet to reshape the US government? Try Reinventing America.
• If you love airships, you can check out the zeppelin page, or on a darker note you might want to listen to the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg Disaster.
• I can't believe that I've finally found some info about I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again out there on the web, but here it is! Perhaps I am on step closer to my age old goal of having every episode of that delightful radio program digitally re-mastered on a mess of CD's.
• The rec.crafts.metalworking faq and it's new News Letter.
• Here's a link to a dramatic picture of a steam loco.
• The ArtMetal page has an interesting collection of metal working articles.