Well, Bill had to go and find out you can get straight .009" rods made of tungsten carbide. Should be good for fusor grids? We're going to find out, as I've upgraded my lathe toolpost "dremel tool with guts" to tool steel shaft, grade 7 bearings, and well under 3 tenths runout (.0003" peak to peak). And earlier I built a stepper motor/arduino jig to hold grid ends and rotate them "precisely" 45 degrees (have no way to measure the error, but if the books I read are right, and this motor is typical, that error should be pretty tiny too...3% of one step, ..054 degrees or so. At any rate, the star of today's show is the jig I just built to cut these tiny rods off all the same length, using the toolpost dremel with a diamond wheel and the lathe axis to move the wheel into the cut - and make them the same all the time and not bend or break them (WC is on the brittle side...). I could sort of do without this with pure W, and .020" rods sort of by hand with a spacer jig, but this should be a lot better for those too - I didn't always get those right, and bent a couple, had a couple short/long ones, etc and usually had to cut 12 to get 8 reasonably good ones. Well those were fairly cheap - WC rods .009" are not cheap. So this time I'm improving my odds of getting things right on the first go. I won't bother to describe the build process in detail here - anyone who has run a mill, a drill press, and the usual suspect hand tools will know how I did this. I got lucky (for me) and only had to mouse out one of the screw holes...so it locates very tightly. I used a 20 mil W rod clamped in there "just so" to put a tiny dent on both the milled Al, and suprisingly, the milled steel as well - it now auto-centers the .009" rod perfectly for me. If I ever make the barely-visible dent too deep, I can just mill off some extra and go again, no sweat - unlike the slim, lithe one I drew, I made a monster, since I had the stock laying around...you know how that is.
Here she is:
I assume this will work a charm. I'll report once I've tried it. When you're off the grid, wintertime kind of stinks for working late in a power hungry shop. I'l already down to zero power input from the panels at 5 pm. I'll be much happier after the solstice.