Two pairs of steel parallel pliers sit on a rough wooden benchtop. The pair on the left is open and the pair on the right is closed, demonstrating the parallel nature of the pliers' jaws over their entire range of motion. There are three brass pins flush with the steel surface of the handles and you can just barely make out the brass and copper filler material between the steel outer surfaces of the handles.

Producing A Pair Of Parallel Pliers

A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] decided to make his own pair from scratch. (YouTube)

The jaws were machined down from round stock in [Paskin]’s mill before heat treating and tempering. The steel portions of the handles were cut from 16 gauge plate steel and half of them were stamped on a fly press to make the bridging section around the pivot bolt. The filler for the handles is copper on one side and brass on the other as [Paskin] didn’t have enough brass of the correct size to do both.

The steel and filler were joined with epoxy and copper pins before beveling the edges and sanding to give a comfortable contour to the handles. The bolts for the pliers started as ordinary hex bolts before being machined down on the lathe to a more aesthetically-pleasing shape and size. The final touches included electrolytically etching a logo into the bridge and then spraying down the pliers with a combination lubricant and corrosion preventative spray. This is surely a pair of pliers worth handing down through the generations.

For more mesmerizing machining, checkout this pocket safe or this tiny adjustable wrench.

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Small low-cost CNC mill with rotary tool

Minimal Mill: The Minamil

Having a few machine tools at one’s disposal is a luxury that not many of us are afforded, and often an expensive one at that. It is something that a large percentage of us may dream about, though, and with some commonly available tools and inexpensive electronics a few people have put together some very inexpensive CNC machines. The latest is the Minamil, which uses a rotary tool and straps it to an economical frame in order to get a functional CNC mill setup working.

This project boasts impressively low costs at around $15 per axis. Each axis uses readily available parts such as bearings and threaded rods that are readily installed in the mill, and for a cutting head the build is based on a Dremel-like rotary tool that has a similarly low price tag. Let’s not ignore the essentially free counterweight that is used.

For control, an Arduino with a CNC shield powers the three-axis device which is likely the bulk of the cost of this project. [Paul McClay] also points out that a lot of the material he needed for this build can be salvaged from things like old printers, so the $45 price tag is a ceiling, not a floor.

The Minamil has been demonstrated milling a wide variety of materials with excellent precision. Both acrylic and aluminum are able to be worked with this machine, but [Paul] also demonstrates it in its capacity to mill PCBs. It does have some limitations but for the price it seems that this mill can’t be beat, even compared to his previous CNC build which repurposed old CD drives.

Beginning The Machine Shop Journey With A DIY CNC

Building a good quality machine shop may seem to present a chicken-and-egg problem, at least for anyone not willing to mortgage their home for the money needed to buy all of these tools new. Namely, that building good tools often requires good tools. To help solve this problem, [Ryan] designed and built this CNC machine which can be built with nothing other than common tools, hardware store supplies, and some readily available parts from the internet.

Since it’s being built from consumer-grade material, [Ryan] has the design philosophy of “buying precision” which means that most of the parts needed for this build are precise enough for their purpose without needing to be worked in any way before incorporation into the mill. For example, he uses a granite plate because it’s hard, flat, heavy, and sturdy enough at the time of purchase to be placed into the machine right away. Similarly, his linear guides do not need to be modified before being put to work with a high degree of precision and minimal calibration. From there, he applies the KISS principle and uses the simplest parts available. With this design process he is able to “bootstrap” a high quality mill for around $1500 USD without needing any extra tools than the ones you likely already have.

The RIG-CNC as it is known has also been made completely open source which further cements its bootstrapability, and there is a lot more detail on the project page and in the video linked below. This project is unique not simply for the mill build from common parts and tools, but because this design philosophy is so robust. Good design goes a lot farther in our builds than a lot of us might realize, and good design often results in more maintainable, hackable things that work for more uses than the original creators may have even thought about.

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3D Print A PCB The Hard Way

There’s an old joke about the physics student tasked with finding the height of a building using a barometer. She dropped the barometer from the roof and timed how long it took to hit the ground. Maybe that was a similar inspiration to [Moe_fpv_team’s] response to the challenge: use a 3D printer to create a PC board. The answer in that case? Print a CNC mill.

[Moe] had some leftover 3D printer parts. A $40 ER11 spindle gets control from the 3D printer software as a fan. The X, Y, and Z axis is pretty standard. The machine can’t mill metal, but it does handy on plywood and fiber board and should be sufficient to mill out a PCB from some copper clad board.

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Vertical Mill Completes Scrapyard Lathe Build

One thing’s for sure: after seeing [Roland Van Roy] build a vertical mill from industrial scrap, we’ve got to find a better quality industrial scrapyard to hang around.

The story of this build started, as many good shop stories do, at the lathe, which in this case was also a scrapyard build that we somehow managed to miss when it first posted. This lathe is decidedly different from the common “Gingery method” we’ve seen a few times, which relies on aluminum castings. Instead, [Roland] built his machine from plate stock, linear slides, and various cast-off bits of industrial machines.

To make his lathe yet more useful, [Roland] undertook this build, which consists of a gantry mounted over the bed of the lathe. The carriage translates left and right along the bed while the spindle, whose axis lines up perfectly with the center axis of the lathe, moves up and down. [Roland] added a platform and a clever vise to the lathe carriage; the lathe tool post and the tailstock are removed to make room for these mods, but can be added back quickly when needed. Digital calipers stand in for digital read-outs (DROs), with custom software running on a Picaxe and a homebrew controller taking care of spindle speed control.

[Roland] reports that the machine, weighing in at about 100 kg, exhibits a fair amount of vibration, which limits him to lighter cuts and softer materials. But it’s still an impressive build, and what really grabbed us was the wealth of tips and tricks we picked up. [Roland] used a ton of interesting methods to make sure everything stayed neat and square, such as the special jig he built for drilling holes in the T-slot extrusions to the use of cyanoacrylate glue for temporary fixturing.

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A Bit Of DIY Helps Cut Straight And Happy Threads

A cheap and effective ratcheting tap.

Need to cut threads into a hole? A tool called a tap is what you need, and a hand-operated one like the one shown here to the side is both economical and effective. A tap’s cutting bit works by going into a pre-drilled hole, and it’s important to keep the tool straight as it does so. It’s one thing to tap a few holes with steady hands and a finely calibrated eyeball, but when a large number of holes need to be tapped it can be worth getting a little help.

The usual tool to help keep a tap straight and pressed gently downwards is called a tap follower, but [Tony] had a lot of M4 holes to tap and no time to order one and wait for it to arrive. Instead, he converted a cheap tap into a tool that could be held in the chuck of his mill, with the freedom to slide up and down as needed. The result? A tap that’s hand-operated but certain to be orthogonal to the work piece, making the job of cutting a lot of threads much more pleasant.

Tapping isn’t just for metal, either. Cutting threads into wood is also done, and be sure to check out this simple method for making your own surprisingly effective wood taps in the shop with a threaded rod, or a lag screw. Of course, the need to tap a hole can be sidestepped by using threaded inserts in the right material, instead.

Making PCBs The Easy Way

Building a PCB at home can be fraught. If you’re etching, there are chemicals and the nuances of toner transfer. If you’re milling, getting the surface height just right, and not breaking those pointy little v-cutters is always a challenge. [Robin] has tips for both of these cases, and solves a lot of the common hassles by using a milling machine.

Whether he’s scraping away etch resist or entire copper isolation lines, [Robin] uses a non-spinning scratching tool instead of a v-bit: they’re more robust and cut every bit as well. He’s got tips for using FlatCam and KiCAD to make scratched-out traces. His registration system allows him to get double-sided boards with a minimum of hassle. And as a bonus, he’s doing some experimentation with embedding SMT parts inside the boards as well. Be sure that you check out his whole guide, or just watch the video embedded below.

We’re pretty sure you’ll pick up a trick or two, and maybe you’ll be convinced to bite the bullet and invest in a nice mill. If you’d like a more traditional take on PCB milling, try out our own [Adil Malik]’s guide.

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