Machining With Electricity Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, January 18 at noon Pacific for the Machining with Electricity Hack Chat with Daniel Herrington!

With few exceptions, metalworking has largely been about making chips, and finding something hard enough and tough enough to cut those chips has always been the challenge. Whether it’s high-speed steel, tungsten carbide, or even little chunks of rocks like garnet or diamond, cutting metal has always used a mechanical interaction between tool and stock, often with spectacular results.

But then, some bright bulb somewhere realized that electricity could be used to remove metal from a workpiece in a controlled fashion. Whether it’s using electric sparks to erode metal — electric discharge machining (EDM) — or using what amounts to electroplating in reverse — electrochemical machining (ECM) — electrical machining methods have made previously impossible operations commonplace.

join-hack-chatWhile the technology behind ExM isn’t really that popular in the hobby machine shop yet, a lot of the equipment needed and the methods to make it all work are conceivably DIY-able. But the first step toward that is understanding how it all works, and we’re lucky enough to have Daniel Herrington stop by the Hack Chat to help us out with that. Daniel is CEO and founder of Voxel Innovations, a company that’s on the cutting edge of electrochemical machining with its pulsed ECM technology. There’s a lot to unpack, so make sure you stop by so we can all get up to speed on what’s up with using electricity to do the machining.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 18 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

12 thoughts on “Machining With Electricity Hack Chat

    1. Everytime I see something like this, it makes me miss Lindsay Publications!

      Nevertheless, I sent the link to everyone in our engineer dept as well as our toolroom manager (we have two plunge and two wire EDM machines)

  1. “While the technology behind ExM isn’t really that popular in the hobby machine shop yet, a lot of the equipment needed and the methods to make it all work are conceivably DIY-able. ”

    Modern machine shop much like a modern kitchen with more tools than one knows what to do with. Anyone need a pasta maker?

  2. For ECM, it would be interesting to learn how he is removing the dissolved metal from the electrolyte. Last time an ECM project was posted here, there were a lot of guesses, but I’d be curious what actually works.

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