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.stage.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.
Founded in 1906 in South Bend, Indiana, South Bend Lathe, at one time, controlled almost half of the U.S. domestic metalworking lathe market. South Bend did a lot of things right, to earn their market share and reputation, and one of the smartest was to produce clear, well-illustrated, low-cost instructional materials describing not just how to set up and run their tools, but how to use them to perform all kinds of basic and advanced machining operations.
Weighing in at eighty pounds, the DW734 is the smaller of two bench-top planers that DeWalt offers. You can pick one up from a big box store for around $360-$400. The 15A, 120V electric motor spins the three cutting blades at 10,000 RPM and the automatic feed system uses two rubber drums to grab the workpiece and steadily feed it through the blades at 96 cuts per inch. The blades are reversible and produce a nice finish, however due to the mounting hole configuration they are very difficult to re-sharpen. You can buy a pack of three replacement blades for around $45 online.
