Collaborate Disseminate
Some people really like puzzles. [Simone Giertz] is one of these serious puzzle lovers and built a transforming table (YouTube) to let her easily switch between puzzles and more mundane …read more Continue reading Tambour Table with a Puzzling Secret
[Kent VanderVelden] has come up with an interesting VR system to assist operators who are monitoring CNC lathes. (video, embedded, below) The idea is to first produce a ‘frozen’ video …read more Continue reading VR Display Shows CNC Lathe Operations In Real Time
Ordinarily, when we need gears, we pop open a McMaster catalog or head to the KHK website. Some of the more adventurous may even laser cut or 3D print them. But what about machining them yourself?
[Uri Tuchman] set out to do just that. Of course, cutting your own gears …read more
Continue reading Homemade Gear Cutting Indexer Blends Art with Engineering
Ask anybody whose spent time standing in front of a mill or lathe and they’ll tell you that some operations can get tedious. When you need to turn down a stainless rod by 1/4″ in 0.030″ increments, you get a lot of time to reflect on why you didn’t just …read more
Continue reading Teaching an Old Lathe New Tricks With a Programmable Power Feed
Ask anybody whose spent time standing in front of a mill or lathe and they’ll tell you that some operations can get tedious. When you need to turn down a stainless rod by 1/4″ in 0.030″ increments, you get a lot of time to reflect on why you didn’t just …read more
Continue reading Teaching an Old Lathe New Tricks With a Programmable Power Feed
The lathe is known as the King of Machine Tools for a reason. There are very few things that you can’t make with one. In fact, people love to utter the old saw that the lathe is the only machine tool that can make itself. While catchy, I think that’s a bit disingenuous. It’s more accurate to say that there are parts in all machine tools that (arguably) only a lathe can make. In that sense, the lathe is the most “fundamental” machine tool. Before you harbor dreams of self-replication, however, know that most of an early lathe would be …read more
If you’re interested in making things (particularly metal things), you’re on a road that eventually leads to machine tools. Machine tools have a special place in history, because they are basically the difference between subsistence farming and modern civilization. A bold statement, I realize — but the ability to make very precise things is what gave us the industrial revolution, and everything that snowballed afterward. If you want to build a modern life filled with jet airplanes and inexpensive chocolate, start here.
Precision is more than just a desirable property. It’s a product. It has value, there is competition to …read more
Continue reading The Precision Upon Which Civilizations Are Built