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.
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. 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.
Ben Fleming wrote a couple books on it. Its been available for awhile now for DIY.
https://www.homebuiltedmmachines.com/
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)
With few exceptions, metalworking has largely been about making chips
euhm, making chips is only a small part of metalworking. There is also casting, forging, welding, folding and cutting sheet metal, and those and more are also all part of metalworking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalworking
I think they meant to type machining :)
“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?
“Anyone need a pasta maker?”
Got one, don’t want another.
Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cygx0Ng6qMk
NO, pasta is cheap and reaDILY AVAILABLE IN THE SUPERMARKET:
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.
Yay hazardous waste likely dumped into our water supply that isn’t easily removed.
Filtering easily gets the larger pieces. For the rest, you could let the water evaporate, leaving the metal behind.
That’s awesome! What do I need to learn about safety before making one of these?