Date Started: 11/2022 Date Finished: 02/2023 Current Dispositon: In Use

The whole gist of this project was to create a 4x4 CNC table that could accomplish the following --

• Laser Cut modest woods/plastics?
• Mill most woods, maybe even aluminum?
• Plasma-cut thin-ish metals

It has been mostly built, though im slowly starting to trust it and use it more.

The machine's first use was actually making LED station name plates for the Mission Control Center of a company operating satellites, which was pretty cool. Most recently, it laser-cut the panel for the Backyard Hero host station.

Little Takeaways

First, but mini takeaway is when it tell myself "Ill take it apart later and paint it"..... I never will... But past that:

CAD is awesome.

I typically disqualified CAD for my larger projects as left to my own devices, I would quickly lose track of tolerances and things would get out of hand (as i dont have anything to measure over 16" to a thousandth accuracy). I drafted this project in CAD, thinking i would just use it as visual inspiration, but given that work was done found ways to keep my tolerance stack low like:

Trying to maximize the use of structures/parts that I could make out of plate or from common pieces (such as tube)

When I did this, I could literally print out a sticker with center holes in it and stick it onto that piece of metal to make the part. So cool!

Leveraging the 3d printer to make jigs

It was one of the projects where I really realized the true potential of having a 3d printer - not only for producing 3d printed parts, but for using 3d printed parts as alignment jigs etc. for metal things. I could make a piece to precisely position pieces of metal to weld, or locate holes that needed to be punched and drilled.

What's left --

Well it works and I can build things with it... but I can finish a few little things -

The table surface still needs to be figured out - Most of me is just waiting for some perforated metal surface to become available for cheap...

But also, the plasma cut function needs to be fully fleshed out. The electronics on the machine side are mostly good to go, I really just need to hook the cutter up and start testing it. The hesitancy here is mostly that plasma cutting is a lot dirtier than the other processes and I want to keep this fella clean...