How do hardware geeks carve pumpkins? With giant home made CNC mills, that’s how. Using the open source CNC kit from Lumenlab.com, they converted a photograph into g-code, then fed it to the machine. After about 20 minutes of pumpkin drilling, they had this beautiful jack-o’-lantern. We are definitely jealous. Keep up the good work Lumenlab.
A video with a higher frame rate would be greatly appreciated. (2FPS simply doesn’t convey motion – it looks like a fast slide show.)
Nice. :)
I program a few $90k HAAS CNC mills at work, i really wanted to do this but i’m afraid i’d contaminate the coolant, and we JUST drained, cleaned, and refilled the machines, so we won’t need to do it again for a while!
Maybe if i gut the pumpkin first it wouldn’t be so bad…
-Taylor
@Taylor Alexander
uh why would you need coolant in the first place? The tooling isn’t going to heat up just carving a pumpkin…
Now do one with the ASCII-art Dwight Schrute from The Office…
@rivetgeek
The CNC has a flood coolant system, so it’s all enclosed, and if pumpkin flys anywhere inside the machine, it will eventually get into the coolant. I could probably do a pretty good job of cleaning it out before running anything with coolant, but man, coolant gets nasty enough with bacteria without me putting organic bits straight into it.
-Taylor
Dude, Laser cut pumpkin…ftw!
Duct tape polyethylene drapes from the top of the sheet metal to the table. Leave enough slack to permit the full range of table motion. Cover the head and toolchanger as well, leaving only the spindle nose exposed. Then all the pumpkin swarf leaves when the poly does, and you just have to clean the table.
Works with wood as well.
coolant is not required for pumpkin carving. and pumpkin most likely wont contaminate the coolant as bad as other things that go in those machines.