Rich Builds Stuff
I came across this posting the other day, about someone using a multi-axis robot arm, like you’d find in the automotive industry, with a custom plastic extruder mounted on the end, to extrude plastic in a 3D space.
It is unlike any other 3D printer I’ve ever seen.
Pretty cool.
Mataerial Introduction from Mataerial on Vimeo.
Another update on the puck mill. The hardware is now complete, pretty much, and the wiring is left. This will take a few days.
I’ve added X and Z axis limit switches now. The Z axis only needs an upper limit, but the X and Y need both + and – limits.
It’s not super clear, but there’s a limit switch behind the spindle motor, that’s activated by that aluminum bracket.
This is a detail of the belt assembly.
I’ve been working a couple of nights a week assembling the CNC puck Mill. It’s a small CNC mill with a work area of about 5 inches square. I’ve tried to use Makerslide, and components available from Inventables.com for as much of the construction as possible. I’ve only machined small adapter pieces, and things like the belt holder, and limit switch arms.
Overview of the CNC Puck Mill
You can see the belt drive installed here on the Y axis
The electronics are laid out on the bench. Thinking about how to house this stuff.
A few weeks ago, it was my son’s birthday party. I decided it would be pretty cool to CNC carve each guest’s name into a puck, to include in the loot bags. It was pretty trivial to set up a template for hockey pucks (they’re 3″ round, and an inch thick, by the way), and to create a design for each guest in Vectric V-Carve pro. I created a single file, with each name on a separate layer, then simply created all the .NC files one after another.
The pucks turned out really well – the rubber is very easy to carve, as you can imagine, and the pucks were really well received by the kids.
Over at Makezine.com I saw this. Would look pretty nice on the ‘ole shop wall.
