The Home Machinist!

Sometimes the market research dictates building the product cheaper rather than better. The CEO of Huffy was asked in an interview once, why the bicycles they made were built so poorly. He answered that their market research indicated that people buying department-store bicycles mainly shopped on pr...

Im daydreaming of building a CNC setup, using 1/2"-10 acme rods instead of ballscrews (at least initially). Where I'm looking there's not much difference in prices for the regular vs. precision rod, but there's a huge difference in price for the nuts. Regular nuts = $7, precision nuts = $35. I ...

I haven't really seen any books either, for the hobby/DIY types. The hardware seems to change regularly, preventing that I suppose. There are places that sell kits more or less--that have all the electronics stuff in them. One that does is http://probotix.com/ ...Then it depends if you are convertin...

...FWIW, I bought a running Tree 325 for $5K. Compare that to what you can build for the same money, especially at the axis travels you say you want. I have no place to put any full-size machine, even if I could get one for free--and a slow CNC would be better than no CNC at all. I would probably m...

There's a zillion sites selling parts for these types of CNC machines, and it's often not real clear how or why they are used. Many only say that they work with one-other-particular-brand of something else, and you wonder what exactly you are getting into with buying it. As for the actual structural...

On another forum people were discussing the various ways that the 3-D plastic extruders (printers) are built, and it got me to thinking.... I don't have a CNC machine at all yet, and would only want one that could cut metals (plain steel and aluminum, at least). The plastic machines aren't really th...

Normal piston engines have issues with stroke/bore ratios much longer than about 1.3:1, due to connecting rod/cylinder interference. The big ship engines are called "cross-head" engines. They have a short piston on an articulated connecting rod, allowing longer strokes than usual. Up to ab...

If you just want a low-friction mechanical bearing, you could try using UHMW polyethylene first. It costs a lot less and is nearly as slippery. The main reason to use Teflon is its chemical resistance (only the most-corrosive stuff will touch it at room temperature) or if Teflon is simply required b...

I have a project that calls for drilling 1/2-3/4" holes through the side of solid aluminum round stock. I've already tried regular 2 and 4 flute end mills, as well as ball end mills, all work but are rather slow, and the vibration is pretty bad with my small mill, a Grizzly 0619. ..... Drill a...

I think somebody on this forum posted this, and I saved it and re-posted it on my own web space- click here note that the date (at the bottom) is late-2010. ------ This gets into a larger issue of national economic policies, but basically: the interests of a national government and the interests of ...

I got the catalog and got intrigued looking at this page also. It is smaller than I'd want so I m not really looking to buy it, but I did read the catalog description. In particular I was wondering what cutters do you use on the horizontal shaft? I've never done this for a living or gotten to play w...

Convert it to a PDF file then everyone can open it. Not everyone has MS Word. Just a thought. :) Ed LibreOffice can open most MS Word docs--but then,,,, it will convert them to PDF's too. If you ever wanted a copy of MS Office for home use but couldn't afford the $500 price tag, LibreOffice pretty ...