Rich Builds Stuff
@Silver_hand and I gave a talk about building your own CNC machine. The talk seemed very well received, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience at the end. Thanks to everyone who attended – you made the talk great!
Here’s the presentation in PPT, and PDF format.
And thanks to Sheri at MakerspaceNorth for hosting us tonight.
We were lucky enough to head over to England for the first Makers Central show in Birmingham in May 2018. @sliver_hand and I flew over on Thursday, to be ready in time for the Saturday and Sunday show. Amazingly, we packed an entire CNC machine in two suitcases, as checked luggage, and managed to man-handle it through the London Tube, as well as onto a train to Birmingham! It was exhausting!
The Makers Central show was excellent – an amazing accomplishment for a first-year event. Nick Zammeti did an amazing job organizing the event. We had HUGE 10×20 foot booth – about 4 times bigger then we needed – but we got set up quickly on Friday, and managed to create some test hockey pucks. Yup, we were two Canadian lads, in England, carving people’s names into hockey pucks! Special thanks to @Vectric, makers of the V-Carve Pro software we used to make the pucks – who managed to snag 200 hockey pucks for us at the show!
The event was great, with really good crowds – and just tons and tons of YouTube stars, like Laura Kampf and Jimmy Diresta, and about a hundred more! It was excellent hanging out in the hotel bar after the show, with all the folks from the show.
When the show finished, we headed down to London, touring the London Science Museum, a special tour of the Goldsmith’s Company, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as dinners with some London friends.
@silver_hand and I talk about the trip in Episode 17 of the Off Hours Podcast.
Wow, what a busy weekend we had, cranking out puck after puck for two days. I had purchased about 150 pucks before the faire, but had to puchase another 100 pucks Sunday morning on the way to the Faire.
The puck mill had created about 15-20 pucks before the faire – test pucks as I was calibrating the X and Y axis, and setting the Z height. But, from the second the Faire started, until it ended, we were continually carving names into pucks. The machine literally ran non-stop – as quickly as we could swap new pucks into the machine, it would start carving again.
So, over two days, we created 300 pucks in total – that’s 300 puck designs, and 300 toolpath G-Code files, and then sending them all to the Planet-cnc controller to create the pucks. Our copy of Vectric V-Carve Pro was really put to the test! [Read more…]