The Beatty family is building a lovely enclosure that will hold the computer and motor control boards for a CNC, using acrylic and MicroRAX t-slot beams. After trying a few different approaches, we decided to build the box from scratch out of 1/8″ acrylic sheet and Microrax, with are tiny, 10mm 80/20 aluminum beams. The […]
A collection of clever ways of slotting flat stock together for CNC, laser cutters, and conventional material cutting and joining.
Travis Good reports on the development of the Shapeoko CNC Mill Kit
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!]
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.
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.
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: […]
