Collaborate Disseminate
We’re not aware of any authoritative metrics on such things, but it’s safe to say that the Ender 3 is among the most hackable commercial 3D printers. There’s just something …read more Continue reading Simple Mods Turn 3D Printer into Electrochemical Metal Cutter
Perhaps you’ve seen them, demonstrations of a machined piece of metal that upon further inspection is actually two pieces machined so perfectly that they appear as one. With extremely tight …read more Continue reading Tricky Screw Heads Have Disappearing Slots
When it comes to turning a raw block of metal into a useful part, most processes are pretty dramatic. Sharp and tough tools are slammed into raw stock to remove …read more Continue reading 3D-Printed Tooling Enables DIY Electrochemical Machining
Of all the methods of making big pieces of metal into smaller pieces of metal, perhaps none is more interesting than electrical discharge machining. EDM is also notoriously fussy, what …read more Continue reading Homemade EDM Machine Moves from Prototype to Production
If you’ve ever played air hockey, you know how the tiny jets of air shooting up from the pinholes in the playing surface reduce friction with the puck. But what if you turned that upside down? What if the puck had holes that shot the air downward? We’re not sure …read more
Continue reading Used EDM Electrodes Repurposed as Air Bearings for Precision Machine Tools
Here at Hackaday, we thought we’d seen every method of making PCBs: CNC machining, masking and etching with a variety of chemicals, laser engraving, or even the crude but effective method of scratching away the copper with a utility knife. Whatever works is fine with us, really, but there still …read more
Continue reading Prototyping PCBs with Electrical Discharge Machining
Drilling holes is easy; humans have been doing it in one form or another for almost 40,000 years. Drilling really tiny holes in hard materials is more challenging, but still doable. Drilling deep, straight holes in hard materials is another thing altogether.
Luckily, these days we have electric discharge machining …read more
Continue reading [Ben Krasnow] Drills Really Small Holes with Electricity
Laser cutters, waterjets, plasma cutters, CNC routers – most hackerspaces and even many dedicated home-gamers seem to have some kind of fancy tool for cutting sheet goods into intricate shapes. But with no access to a CNC machine and a need to cut a complex shape from sheet metal, [AlchemistDagger] cooked up this bare-bones and somewhat dangerous EDM rig to get the job done.
Electric discharge machining has been around for decades and is used a lot for harder metals like titanium and tool steel. The process makes sense to anyone who has seen contacts pitted and corroded by repeated …read more
[Jeff Rodriguez] has been busy testing a feasible DIY method for rifling a barrel and has found some success using salt water, a power supply, wire, and 3D printed parts to create the grooves of rifling without the need for any moving parts or cutting tools. Salt water flows between the barrel’s inside surface and a 3D-printed piece that holds wires in a precise pattern. A current flows between the barrel and the wires (which do not actually touch the inside of the barrel) and material is eroded away as a result. 10-15 minutes later there are some promising looking …read more
Many years ago [ScorchWorks] built an electrical-discharge machining tool (EDM) and recently decided to write about it. And there’s a video embedded after the break.
The build is based on the designs described in the book “Build an EDM” by Robert Langolois. An EDM works by creating lots of little electrical discharges between an electrode in the desired shape and a material underneath a dielectric solvent bath. This dissolves the material exactly where the operator would like it dissolved. It is one of the most precise and gentle machining operations possible.
His EDM is built mostly out of found parts. …read more
Continue reading Homemade EDM Can Cut Through Difficult Materials Like Magnets With Ease
