Machining Gets Wet And Wild

Electromachining

[Tyler] has had his electrochemical machining hack up for a while now. His final version uses a pump to move electrolyte out through the etching head and onto the workpiece. This keeps fresh electrolyte in the etching region and clears out the insoluble material. We see how this could be attached to a CNC system and used to etch PCBs without the use of a special inkjet printer, toner transfer, or laser etching machine.

[thanks Ian]

24 thoughts on “Machining Gets Wet And Wild

  1. Wow, drilling holes with electricity? Why haven’t I heard of this… Oh wait, I already own a EDM machine. Hmm, and mine is already cnc controlled with a .00005″ positioning accuracy.

  2. another “first” – just what this site needs, get a life Pilotgeek

    as for the issue of overloading servers, if I site says it is self hosted or something like that – try and cache/archive the site – has anyone checked the Internet Archive for the page – they keep current sites available as well for a backup, and I have made use of it when a page featured on HackADay goes down from server load or old posts…

    I just checked while typing this – it is an older version, but it should give readers the gist: http://web.archive.org/web/20080611050924/http://burningsmell.org/electrochem/

  3. @ The_Evil_Machinist
    lucky you but you do know most “normal” people don’t haven tens or hundreds of thousand dollars to spend on one like you.
    if you made one(and i’m sure you couldn’t)i bet you would be proud and then some douche bag would say something stupid like you did,but i guess this time you are the douche bag
    douche bag!

  4. Why sites like this don’t make a habit of using Coral links instead is beyond me. It used to happen once in a while, but it seems like people have totally forgotten about this service…

  5. Actually you can get sinker EDMs for pretty cheap. The smaller ones in the 20-30 amp range go barely above scrap.

    Multi-axis wires, which I want, cost much more.

    Lindsay books has a book on building a simple tap burner type edm setup.

  6. can someone mirror this please?

    also there is a way to drill holes using gallium, in effect you drip metal into an existing dent in the Al plate, and it cuts through it- then immerse in water to remove the aluminium and repeat. virtually no wastage although the hole is a bit ragged…

  7. ^^^ that looks exactly like the Internet Archive page I linked to a few posts up – on the archive version, the project was also listed as complete, but again there are no pictures because it is the archive and not every site gets its pictures archived

  8. You could get a used low amp die sinker for about 3 thou. A used Multi axis wire edm costs about 10 and some change. Yes this sinker type edm is pretty neat for the cost of it. But you lose accuracy in the inefficiency of this design.

  9. “We do not like to censor. We do not delete dissenting viewpoints. We don’t delete criticism.

    We will delete spam and I have classified “firsts” as spam.

    Posted at 5:28 pm on Oct 1st, 2009 by calebkraft”

    What? Are you serious? What happened to…
    http://hackaday.com/2009/08/27/bus-pirate-updates-preorder-2-and-v3/

    and the myriad of nasty comments criticising the announcement of a v3 before the bulk of v2 bus pirates have even shipped?

    There was actually something some information in those comments I was hoping to read, but the whole post was deleted. Luckily I have the whole page saved…. comments and all.

  10. Hi! Sorry for the access problems, my site was REALLY getting hammered by too many viewers, a problem I had never had before ;) I took it offline temporarily.

    Also, google’s giving a warning for my webpage now for no apparent reason. I cannot find anything in any static or dynamic content that would fit their criteria for an “attack site”, so I’ve requested google either re-review the site or explain why they blocked it.

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