A full-size turret mill is, of necessity, a heavy, expensive piece of equipment, impractical for most individual owners due to space and/or monetary constraints. For hobby work, however, a so-called “mini mill” can perform very well. The chief limitation of a mini-mill is not so much the quality of the work it can produce, but the size of the work it can handle.
One thing I wrestle with in my day-to-day, sometimes literally, is shipping boxes — lots of shipping boxes: boxes of MAKE books and magazines, review books and hardware, and boxes of other cool stuff that shows up on my doorstep. And because I don’t drive and live alone, most of my shopping is on the internet. More boxes. So, my most frequent around-the-office tools are scissors and a box cutter. So, I was very interested when Fiskars offered to send me one of their new ShopBoss snips-based multi-tool.
Chicago’s American Machine Tools Corporation buys, sells, ships, and repairs heavy machine tools all over the world. They also maintain a curriculum of free, online, non-brand-specific operator education materials, including the best general How to Use a Milling Machine page I’ve seen. There are no videos, but personally I prefer old-fashioned text and diagrams for this purpose. If you are interested in movies, however, check out MIT’s Introduction to the Mill.
Printrbot, just successfully crowd-funded by Lincoln, California resident Brook Drumm, bills itself as an all-in-one 3D printer kit that “can be assembled and printing in a couple of hours.” Hack a Day’s Brian Benchoff gives a cogent technical analysis. Apart from the Kickstarter itself, Mr. Drumm maintains a Flickr set, a Vimeo account, and a fledgling blog dedicated to the project.
Ohio IT professional Rick Pollack founded MakerGear, LLC in 2009 to “develop products and services for the rapidly expanding maker community with a focus on advancing digital fabrication.” Working with wife Karen, Rick has already brought two fully-developed desktop 3D printers to market—a well-regarded Prusa Mendel kit and their flagship design, the Mosaic—as well as a line of accessories and upgrades for each.
A three-part series from Mikey over at MachinistBlog.com. Mikey has been a machinist for 15 years, and has come ’round to the belief that high-speed steel (HSS) cutters, rather than the pricier, lower-maintenance, carbide-tipped bits, are the way to go on a hobby-sized metalworking lathe. He also makes a compelling argument for using a belt sander, instead of the traditional bench grinder, for making, shaping, and sharpening HSS lathe tools.
At MAKE, we’re crazy for kits. That’s why we just produced a special issue that’s all about kits, our Ultimate Kit Guide 2012, and are also launching a new website dedicated to kit reviews, at kits.makezine.com. Available at newsstands nationwide, the Ultimate Kit Guide includes nearly 200 reviews of top kits ranging from beginner’s crafts to wooden kayaks to advanced robotics to alcoholic beverages and everything in between.
