Our good friend Mike Baxter sent us a picture of his custom modded Hildbrandt and we thought it was so well done we wanted to share it on our blog for other Hildbrandt enthusiasts to enjoy. This tattoo machine custom modified by Mike makes use of a single piece spring, which I think is a pretty cool idea, the less parts, the smoother it should run. Another reason I like this setup is because when you reduce springs from 2 to 1, it takes off pressure from the back spring.
The most common spring to break is the back spring because the tension area is limited to the small gap between the back of the frame and the armature bar. With a single piece spring, a maximized amount of throw is achieved with tension being spread throughout the spring. I might try my hand at making a Hildbrandt with a single spring some time soon. Thank you Mike for your chats with us, Richard forwards some of your emails to me and I find them to be very informative.
Words from Mike:
Richard,
I’ve attached some pictures I just took, hopefully they turn out ok…
I’m not a machine builder by any stretch of the imagination. I was sitting around thinking and looking at my machines one day not too long ago and I kept thinking to myself, “Why do you have to have 2 springs” what’s the purpose behind having two springs as opposed to a single one? So after much deliberation I went out to the very primitive shop that is available here and found another piece of spring steel from the banding straps, they seem about the same gauge and seem to work pretty well. The first one I cut was not accurate as I measured it wrong so this was experiment #2. Well, once I got it assembled and tuned I found it shade pretty damn well, I don’t notice any difference at all from the single spring set up as opposed to the 2 spring set up. What I did notice was that you don’t have to fiddle so much with alignment on the darn thing as it pretty much “self aligns” if you have it on there half way straight. Again, I’m not a builder, used what I had, and it works for me, whether its acceptable in the tattoo society as something that is worth while who knows…..cheers.
mike
