Are Minimills Worth It?
These days, the bar for home-built projects is high. With 3D printers, CNC, and cheap service providers, you can’t get away with building circuits in a shoe box or an …read more Continue reading Are Minimills Worth It?
Category Archives: mill
Producing a Pair of Parallel Pliers
A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] …read more Continue reading Producing a Pair of Parallel Pliers
Minimal Mill: The Minamil
Having a few machine tools at one’s disposal is a luxury that not many of us are afforded, and often an expensive one at that. It is something that a …read more Continue reading Minimal Mill: The Minamil
Beginning the Machine Shop Journey with a DIY CNC
Building a good quality machine shop may seem to present a chicken-and-egg problem, at least for anyone not willing to mortgage their home for the money needed to buy all …read more Continue reading Beginning the Machine Shop Journey with a DIY CNC
3D Print a PCB the Hard Way
There’s an old joke about the physics student tasked with finding the height of a building using a barometer. She dropped the barometer from the roof and timed how long it took to hit the ground. Maybe that was a …read more
Vertical Mill Completes Scrapyard Lathe Build
One thing’s for sure: after seeing [Roland Van Roy] build a vertical mill from industrial scrap, we’ve got to find a better quality industrial scrapyard to hang around.
The story of this build started, as many good shop stories do, at the lathe, which in this case was also a …read more
Continue reading Vertical Mill Completes Scrapyard Lathe Build
A Bit of DIY Helps Cut Straight and Happy Threads
Need to cut threads into a hole? A tool called a tap is what you need, and a hand-operated one like the one shown here to the side is both economical and effective. A tap’s cutting bit works by going into a pre-drilled hole, and it’s important to keep the …read more
Continue reading A Bit of DIY Helps Cut Straight and Happy Threads
Making PCBs the Easy Way
Building a PCB at home can be frought. If you’re etching, there are chemicals and the nuances of toner transfer. If you’re milling, getting the surface height just right, and not breaking those pointy little v-cutters is always a challenge. [Robin] has tips for both of these cases, and solves …read more
A Boring Tale With Six Sides
Making a hole in a piece of material is a straightforward process, after all most of us will have some form of drill. If we need a hole that isn’t round though, after the inevitable joke about bad drill control leading to oval holes, what do we do? Get busy …read more
A DIY Bench-Sized Milling Machine
Hanging around the machining community online, you’d be more than familiar with clapped out Bridgeport mills, which are practically a meme at this point. But mills come in all shapes and sizes, from the stout old iron from the days of yore, to smaller, compact builds. [Honus] decided to build …read more