Personal engineering projects built between roughly 2012 and 2021, documented here in 2021.
These pages are kept as a record rather than as current work. The tools, parts and techniques are what they were at the time, and some projects were set aside unfinished — that’s noted where it applies. Most of this predates my engineering degree; it’s where the hands-on side of the work came from.
10″ Dobsonian Telescope Drive
An equatorial platform for a salvaged 10-inch reflector, rotating about an inclined axis to cancel the earth’s rotation. Several drive revisions before landing on a threadless ballscrew built from six ball bearings and an 8 mm linear rail. Includes the resulting astrophotography.
Long-Range Fixed-Wing UAV
Built from the salvaged parts of the multicopters below. Autonomous flight on Ardupilot with full telemetry, FPV video from three cameras, and two generations of motorized RSSI-driven tracking antenna. Set aside before completion, though the system met most of its objectives.
CNC Diode Laser & Ablative Techniques
A 5.5 W diode module on a 3018-style desktop CNC, pushed well past its intended use: marking steel through molybdenum disulfide reactive coatings, ablating Cerakote, three-dimensional texturing in wood, dithered-noise patterning on ABS, and early experiments in selective grain restructuring of metals.
Machining & Heat-Treating Vise Jaws
Replacement jaws for the farm’s Wilton 1765 after one cracked and no parts were available. O1 tool steel, a guilloché pattern cut with a hand-ground carbide bit, then quenched and tempered in a propane forge built years earlier.
Optical Microscopy & 3D-Printed Camera Mount
A press-fit eyepiece adapter for imaging through an optical microscope, and what it found: the lost heat treatment on cheap razor blades, copper depositing onto iron filings in a time-lapse, and Brownian motion in homogenized milk.
Barn-Door Tracker
The lighter sibling of the Dobsonian platform — a hinged camera mount driven by a curved threaded rod, sized from thread pitch, sidereal rate and gear reduction, and pointed at Polaris to hold stars as points rather than trails.
Multicopters
A multi-year run of quadcopter revisions starting around 2014, from self-machined aluminum and carbon fibre through a weight-saving printed ABS clamshell. The clamshell proved too weak and the airframe was lost in a crash — its parts became the fixed-wing UAV.
1966 Ford Bronco Air Filter Adapter
A small, self-contained design problem: adapting a modern K&N filter onto a manifold built for an obsolete oil-bath unit, using three radial webs to reach a single central mounting point. Still in service and crack-free five years after installation.
Jason Rucks 