This $12 CNC Rotary Axis Will Make Your Head Spin

Wood game piece being carved by a CNC mill with a hacked rotary axis

[legolor] brings us a great, cheap rotary axis to add to your small 3 axis CNC mills. How are you going to generate G-Code for this 4th axis? That’s the …read more Continue reading This $12 CNC Rotary Axis Will Make Your Head Spin

Hackaday Podcast 082: DJ CNC, NFC Black Box, Sound of Keys, and Payin’ for 3D Prints

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys check in on the best hacks from the past week. All the buzz is the algorithm that can reverse engineer your house keys from the way they sound going into the lock. Cardboard construction goes extreme with an RC car build that’s beyond …read more

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How Much Wood Can a Woodpecker Chuck?

It’s probably clear to a Hackaday reader that we live in a golden era for hobbyist tool accessibility. Cheap single board computers can be bought at any neighborhood RadioShack or Maplin. 3D printers sell fully assembled and ready to run for less than $200. Even the humble CNC mill …read more

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A 3D Printer To PCB Miller Conversion

Got a 3D printer? With a bit of work, you may also have a PCB miller. That’s the basis of this neat hack by [Gosse Adema], who converted an Anet A8 3D printer into a PCB miller by building a holder for a Dremel rotary tool and adapting the GCode. This approach means that the adaptations to the printer are minimal: the only hardware is a 3D-printed holder for the Dremel that replaces the print head. The result is an impressive PCB milling machine that can do double-sided PCBs and make through holes.

The excellent write-up that [Gosse] did on …read more

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Soundproofing A CNC Mill Conversion

The Proxxon MF70 is a nice desktop sized milling machine with a lot of useful add-on accessories available for it, making it very desirable for a hacker to have one in his or her home workshop. But its 20000 rpm spindle can cause quite the racket and invite red-faced neighbors. Also, how do you use a milling machine in your home-workshop without covering the whole area in metal chips and sawdust? To solve these issues, [Tim Lebacq] is working on Soundproofing his CNC mill conversion.

To meet his soundproof goal, he obviously had to first convert the manual MF70 to …read more

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Home Made 5-Axis CNC Head Is A Project To Watch

[Reiner Schmidt] was tired of renting an expensive 5-axis CNC head for projects, so he decided to build his own. It’s still a work in progress, but he’s made remarkable progress so far. The project is called Bridge Boy, and it is designed to use a cheap DC rotary mill to cut soft materials like plastic, wood and the like. Most of it is 3D printed, and he has released the Autodesk 360 plans that would allow you to start building your own. His initial version uses an Arduino with stepper drivers, and is designed to fit onto the end …read more

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