My work

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Chapter4
Chapter5
Chapter6
Chapter7
Chapter8
Chapter9
Chapter10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25

My work

I work in a family business. This shop/office is a few miles from home. I work here with my dad and my brother works with us from Scottsdale. We have developed an electric toothbrush with water jet. (4 jets) It has 125 parts in it. Click here to see the official website, designed and maintained by my brother Rob. All molds were made in China, and our factory assembles various components, and sends them to us via oceanliner and we do final assembly here. My job is: Design of misc components including spring loaded water cup seal,
development of processes to separate water from electrical wire in water hose using sonic welding, Design and implementation of on/off switch subassembly which consists of electronic/mechanical components.click for photo
Sourcing, specifying and ordering equipment. Design and fabrication of fixturing, and all other prototyping. We use Solidworks for all design.

These are our two sonic welding machines. In our electric toothbrush, we have 5 components that are joined by fusing the plastic together. They vibrate at 20,000 times per second.

These are my CNC milling machines. I used to have a machine shop. These machines have made lots of parts. You can hog 1" stainless steel with a .75 carbide cutter, or you can use a .010 cutter (3 of your hairs stacked together) and engrave lines .001 apart, .0005 deep. I have made lots of things for the cozy. I generate a solid model in Solidworks, save it as a dwg, then create the machines toolpath in Mastercam and save it to disk. The machines have floppy disk drives.

You can see the materials rack here, and my rockets on top. I used to fly high powered model rockets when I lived in Fort Collins Colorado. Our club would meet up in the mountains once a month, and we'd set up our club launch pads, and take turns launching our latest creations. Once certified, you can buy motors that will lift you off the ground! The motors consist of multiple slugs of ammonium prochlorate housed in a re-usable anodized aluminum case that are secured into the bottom of the rocket.

Here is a batch of handles with the motors and gears installed, waiting to have the water hoses (below) mated to them, and then they will be sonic welded to the bottom half of the handle. These were assembled in China, and we finish them up here.

Water Hoses
Here, the pcbs with the switches soldered to them have been soldered to the wires contained inside the water hose. These hoses carry the water from the pump in the base unit up to the handle, and then through the .018 nozzles in the brush heads. (2 per brush head, 2 brush heads per unit.

This is our main assembly floor. You can see the Sherline lathe on the table in the fore. It is extremely accurate and can make tiny round parts of any material.

Here is the stairway leading up to my office.

My Lincoln Square Wave TIG 175 model tig welder. You can weld a razor blade to a crankshaft with this thing. Aluminum too. I got lucky and bought this from a guy in my business park who makes his own racing bicycles (the lance armstrong kind). He was upgrading to a fancier one and sold it to me for 750.00.

Another view of our assembly floor.

Here is my office

Max is my dad's dog. Every dog has his gig, whatever it may be. Max's gig is if you pick up a basketball, he goes TOTALLY NUTS! He has officially punctured 7 basketballs. Now he is trained that this flat one is the only one he gets. While you dribble, he's right there on you, munching on his ball, trying to get a piece of your ball and knock it away. If you don't dribble defensively, he will knock it away. For real! And when you shoot, he goes in like a real player would for the rebound.

Email -- Jay Hegemann