Electromagnets Make Vertical CNC Cutter A Little Stickier

April 12, 2024 by 10 Comments

Workholding is generally not a problem on a big CNC plasma cutter.; gravity does a pretty good job of keeping heavy sheet steel in place on the bed. But what if your CNC table isn’t a table? The answer: magnets — lots of magnets.

The backstory on this is a bit involved, but the condensed version is that [Lucas] needed a CNC plasma cutter big enough to cut full-sized sheets of steel, but lacked the floor space in his shop for such a beast. His solution was to build a custom CNC machine that stands more or less vertically, allowing him to cut full sheets in a mere fraction of the floor space. It’s a fantastic idea, one that he put a lot of effort into, but it’s not without its problems. Chief among them is the tendency for the sheet metal to buckle and bulge during cutting since gravity isn’t working for him, along with the pesky problem of offcuts slipping away.

To help hold things in place, [Lucas] decided to magnetize the bed of his cutter. That required winding a bunch of magnets, which is covered in the video below. Mass production of magnets turns out not to be as easy as you’d think. Also unexpected was the need to turn off magnets when the cutting torch is nearby, lest the magnetic field bork the cutting plasma. [Lucas] grabbed some code from the LinuxCNC forum that streams the gantry coordinates over serial and used an Arduino to parse those messages. When the torch is getting close to one of the magnets, a relay board cuts power to just that magnet. You can see it in action in the video below; at around the 18:15 mark, you can see the sheet bulging up a bit when the torch comes by, and sucking back down when it moves on.

The amount of work [Lucas] put into this project is impressive, and the results are fantastic. This isn’t the first time he’s relied on the power of magnets to deal with sheet steel, and it probably won’t be the last.

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Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself

January 23, 2024 by 18 Comments

The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as this fully automated CNC lathe work cell shows.

This build comes to us from the woodshop of [Maher Lagha], where he’s making wooden honey dippers. Wooden dowel blanks are dispensed from an infeed rack and chucked between centers on the headstock and pneumatic tailstock. A two-axis stage in front of the workpiece moves a tool against the spinning stock, carving out the honey dipper in just a few minutes. When the lathe work is done, the spindle stops, the tailstock pulls the honey dipper back off the headstock, and a pneumatic piston unceremoniously whacks the almost-finished part — it looks like it still needs a little manual post-processing — into a bin. Lather, rinse, repeat, profit.

[Maher] doesn’t provide many details, but just looking at the work cell shows a veritable feast of industrial automation equipment. The spindle and tailstock of the lathe sit on a bed made from a massive slab of aluminum extrusion, and the X- and Y-axes use linear rails and ballscrews. And mindful of the effects of wood chips on delicate mechanisms, [Maher] did a good job of containing the mess with a host of acrylic guards.

As we said when we saw [Maher]’s wooden coaster work cell a while back, the wood widget business must be pretty good to justify automation like this. What’s nice with both these rigs is that they look like they could be quickly reprogrammed and retooled to create other products. Pretty impressive.

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Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean

December 23, 2023 by 18 Comments

When you own an enormous CNC router, you’ve got to find projects that justify it. So why not shoot for the sky — literally — and build the 1980s-est possible thing: a full-scale flying Delorean.

Attentive readers will no doubt remember [Brian Brocken] from his recent attempt to bring a welding robot out of retirement. That worked quite well, and equipped with a high-speed spindle, the giant ABB robot is now one of the biggest CNC routers we’ve ever seen. As for the flying Delorean, short of the well-known Mr. Fusion mod, [Brian] had to settle for less fictional approaches. The project is still in its early phase, but it appears that the flying car will basically be a huge quadcopter, with motors and propellers hidden under the chassis. That of course means eschewing the stainless steel of the OEM design for something lighter: expanded polystyrene foam (EPS).

The video below shows the fabrication of most of the body, which starts as large blocks of EPS and ends up as shaped panels and an unthinkable amount of dust. Individual pieces are glued together with what looks like plain old PVA adhesive. The standard Delorean “frunk” has been replaced by a louvered assembly that will act as an air intake; we presume the rear engine cover will get the same treatment. Interestingly, the weight of the finished model is almost exactly what Fusion 360 predicted based on the 3D model — a mere 13.9 kg.

[Brian] is currently thrust-testing motors and propellers and has some interesting details on that process in his write-up. There’s obviously a lot of work left on this project, and a lot more dust to be made, and we’ll be eagerly following along. Continue reading “Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean” →

CNC Plus Microscope Plus Game Controller Equals Awesome

November 20, 2023 by 4 Comments

What do you get if you strap a microscope onto a CNC and throw in a gaming controller? The answer, according to Reddit user [AskewedBox] is something kind of awesome: you get a microscope that can be controlled with the game controller for easier tracking of tiny creepy-crawlies.

[ASkewedBox] set up this interesting combination of devices, attaching their Adonostar AD246S microscope to the stage of a no-brand 1610 CNC bought off Amazon, then connected the CNC to a computer running Universal G-Code Sender. This great open source program takes the input from an Xbox game controller and uses it to jog the CNC.

With a bit of tweaking, the game controller can now move the microscope, so it can be used to track microbes and other small creatures as they wander around on the slide mounted below the microscope eating each other. The movement of this is surprisingly smooth: the small CNC and a well-mounted microscope means that there seems to be very little wobble or backlash as the microscope moves.

[Askewedbox] hasn’t finished yet, though: in the latest update, he adds a polarizing lens to the setup and mentions that he wants to add focus control to the system, which is controlled by a remote that comes with the microscope.

There are plenty of other things that could be added beyond that, though, such as auto pan and stitch for larger photos, auto focus stacking and perhaps even auto tracking using OpenCV to track the hideous tiny creatures that live in the microscopic realm. What would you do to make this even cooler?

Wooden Game Boy Is A Challenging Intro CNC Project

November 4, 2023 by 12 Comments

[Sebastian] describes himself as “a total noob” when it comes to CNC, so in an attempt to get to know his new CNC router, he chose about the most complex possible project — replicating an original Game Boy case in wood. And spoiler alert: he nailed it.

Of course, he did have a few things going for him. At least from a straight woodworking perspective, it’s hard to go wrong by choosing walnut as your material. Then again, it can be unforgiving at times, and picky about tooling, which is probably why [Sebastian] used nine different tools to get the job done. But where he upped the difficulty level was in reproducing so many of the details of the original injection-molded plastic case. There are top and bottom shells, each of which has to be milled from both sides. This makes registration tricky when the parts are flipped. Specific indexing holes were used for that, along with the old “blue tape and CA glue” fixturing trick, which seemed to work quite well. For our money, though, the best bit is the lettering on the front face, which was milled out with an engraving bit and then filled with a spritz of white spray paint. A surfacing bit then came along to knock the overspray down, leaving labels that contrast beautifully with the dark wood. Gorgeous!

It wasn’t all easy sailing, though. There are just some things plastic can do that wood can’t, like holding screw threads in small studs without splitting. So, the case had to be glued shut once the mix of salvaged and new components went in. Still, it looks fabulous, and [Sebastian] says what we see in the video below is the one and only piece. Pretty sweet for the first try. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem as if we’ve seen a wooden Game Boy before — a wooden NES, sure, but not a Game Boy.

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What The Artisan 3-in-1 CNC Offers (If One Has The Table Space)

November 1, 2023 by 34 Comments

I never feel like I have enough space in my workshop. The promise of consolidating tools to make the most of limited space drew me to the Snapmaker Artisan, a plus-sized 3-in-1 tool combining 3D printer, laser engraver, and CNC machine.

Smaller than three separate tools, but still big.

Jacks of all trades may be masters of none, but it is also true that a tool does not need to be a master of its functions to be useful. For many jobs, it enough to simply be serviceable. Does a machine like the Artisan offer something useful to a workshop?

Snapmaker was kind enough to send me an Artisan that I have by now spent a fair bit of time with. While I have come to expect the occasional glitch, having access to multiple functions is great for prototyping and desktop manufacturing.

This is especially true when it allows doing a job in-house where one previously had to outsource, or simply go without. This combo machine does have something to offer, as long as one can give it generous table space in return.

What It Is

The Artisan is a large dual-extrusion 3D printer, CNC router, and diode-based laser engraver. To change functions, one physically swaps toolheads and beds. Very thankfully, there are quick-change fixtures for this.

Driving the Artisan is Snapmaker’s software Luban (GitHub respository). Named for the ancient Chinese master craftsman, it is responsible for job setup and control. For laser and CNC work, there are convenient built-in profiles for a variety of paper, plastic, leather, and wood products.

The unit is enclosed, nicely designed, and — while I have come to expect the occasional glitch — serviceable at all three of its functions. The size and stature of the machine warrants some special mention, however.

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CNC Soldering Bot Handles Your Headers

September 30, 2023 by 39 Comments

Soldering pin headers by hand is a tedious task, especially when your project has a huge number of them. [iforce2d] has a large number of boards with a lot of headers, and has created a rather special CNC machine to to do the job. It’s a soldering robot, controlled by LinuxCNC and you can see it below the break.

Superficially it resembles a 3D printer made in aluminium, with an X-Y movable table and a Z-direction represented by a soldering iron and solder feeder on an arm. The solder feeder uses a Bowden tube, with a 3D-printer extruder motor pushing the solder wire down a PTFE tube and finally into a fine aluminium tube from which it’s fed to the iron tip.

Though he’s done a beautiful job of it, creating the machine is not all that’s required, because the tool path requires more attention than simply moving the iron to each pin and supplying some solder. There’s a need to consider the effect of that heat, how much each pad needs, and how much neighbouring pads contribute.

We’ve had repetitive soldering tasks just like this one though not on this scale, so we can understand the tedium this machine will relieve. We can’t however help being reminded of XKCD 1319.

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