See Through Gear Chain Guard

I'm making a thickness sander and I realized that there was a good chance that I would be able to do something stupid and get my hands / pants caught in a moving chain.

I decided to make a box for it out of clear plexiglas so that I would be able to see it running.  I could have made it out of wood, but that would not have been as cool as this...

There are many laser box makers on the web, but the one that I like the best is http://boxmaker.rahulbotics.com/ 

All you have to do is to plug in the height, width, and length, and you have a PDF that you can pull into corel draw and you are well on your way to making a box.

I needed to make some changes to the files, so I regrouped the vectors for each of the sides.  One of the things that I had to figure out was how I was going to affix the box to the thickness sander.  I also had to figure out how I was going to get the box over the chain.

I always make a test box out of cardboard first.  This helped my to visualize the problems.

Once I was sure that I had the design worked out with the cardboard mock-up, I then laser cut the plexiglas.

I leave the paper on so that the soot does not get all over the plexiglas.  If you want to see how to laser cut, check out this instructable:

I used weldon to glue it together.  This instructable shows how to glue plexiglas.

After it was dry, I used a couple of wood screws to affix the case.  Notice that the entire case is glued together.  I made sure that I had hole pre-cut in the plexiglas to ensure that I would be able to attach the guard.

I am one step closer to getting this thing running.  I get the feeling that this will never end.

I made it at Tech Shop