Doug Kerr
Well-known member
This doesn't relate to photography as such (although there is considerable photographic content in what I will introduce here), but it is a matter of which Carla and I are very proud and in which we thought some of our friends here might be interested.
A few years ago, after a long hiatus, took up quilting again, vowing to make quilts for all the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and de facto godchildren. We soon decided to equip ourselves with a quilting machine, a system involving a sewing machine that travels (guided by the user, manually) on a carriage over a large frame, stitching the "quilting" pattern across the three-layer fabric "sandwich" of the quilt in multiple "passes".
This year, we decided to upgrade that capability with a system having a larger "sewing head" (allowing a wider swath across the quilt to be stitched at one pass) and providing fully-automatic guidance of the sewing head (just as in a numerically-controlled machine tool).
Although there are vendors that offer fully integrated systems of this nature, they are extremely costly and, more to the point, none of the ones in the class in which we were interested had all the functional or design features we considered vital. So we decided to integrate the system ourselves from commercially-available subsystems.
Rather than go on with the story here, I will introduce a new technical article, "A Modern Automated Machine Quilting System", available on The Pumpkin here:
http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/pumpkin/index.htm#QuiltingMachine
It hints at the saga of this project and describes the resulting system in some detail, profusely illustrated.
You can imagine the amount of effort this project took overall (especially under my thorough, some might say obsessive, outlook with regard to engineering and technological details) and this has given you here some relief from my equally-obsessive gratuitous pontification on photographic matters!
A few years ago, after a long hiatus, took up quilting again, vowing to make quilts for all the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and de facto godchildren. We soon decided to equip ourselves with a quilting machine, a system involving a sewing machine that travels (guided by the user, manually) on a carriage over a large frame, stitching the "quilting" pattern across the three-layer fabric "sandwich" of the quilt in multiple "passes".
This year, we decided to upgrade that capability with a system having a larger "sewing head" (allowing a wider swath across the quilt to be stitched at one pass) and providing fully-automatic guidance of the sewing head (just as in a numerically-controlled machine tool).
Although there are vendors that offer fully integrated systems of this nature, they are extremely costly and, more to the point, none of the ones in the class in which we were interested had all the functional or design features we considered vital. So we decided to integrate the system ourselves from commercially-available subsystems.
Rather than go on with the story here, I will introduce a new technical article, "A Modern Automated Machine Quilting System", available on The Pumpkin here:
http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/pumpkin/index.htm#QuiltingMachine
It hints at the saga of this project and describes the resulting system in some detail, profusely illustrated.
You can imagine the amount of effort this project took overall (especially under my thorough, some might say obsessive, outlook with regard to engineering and technological details) and this has given you here some relief from my equally-obsessive gratuitous pontification on photographic matters!
