CNC Panel Joinery Notebook
A collection of clever ways of slotting flat stock together for CNC, laser cutters, and conventional material cutting and joining.
cnc
Shapeoko, the Affordable CNC Mill Kit
Travis Good reports on the development of the Shapeoko CNC Mill Kit
Cast Cement CNC Chassis
Those of you who click through to read more about this very cool project from grad student Kenny Cheung of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms may be a bit disappointed: The page is not really complete yet and a bunch of the resources, including the physibles, are still “coming soon!” But it’s so cool, I didn’t want to wait. Looks like the molds are laser cut and, I would expect, reusable. [Thanks, thatcherc!]
Punch Tape Programmable Metal Mill from 1952
This fascinating article from Scientific American describes one of the world’s very first numerically-controlled machine tools, a 3-axis Cincinatti Milling Machine Company “Hydro-Tel” painstakingly adapted for programmable electronic control two years before the first commercial silicon transistors.
MicroRAX and Lego CNC
Jason Welch built this lovely CNC from MicroRAX t-slot beams with Lego bricks for the linear paths. See the video’s notes for some notes on sourcing the various components.
How-To: Add a Laser Head to a CNC Mini Mill
David Prutchi, whose surplus plutonium probe shenanigans we covered last week, received Micro-Mark’s branded version of the popular Sieg X2 mini mill for a recent birthday, then retrofitted it with a CNC kit from CNC Fusion, and then retrofitted it again with a CO2 laser head he built himself from a surplus tube. David writes: […]
Foam Carving Robot
We have covered at least one DIY CNC hot wire cutter before, and commercial versions are manufactured by several companies including Hotwire Direct, Streamline Automation, and FoamLinx. This machine, built in 2006 by students under Dr. René Straßnick at the Technical University of Berlin, has two translational axes and a third, rotational axis consisting of a turntable to which the foam substrate is attached. Parts from an old dot-matrix printer were used to make the Cartesian robot.