Lots has happened in the past few days. First off, I forgot to mention on Monday that I got all the pieces for the gantry milled out by Terry at Village Sign Works and picked them up last Saturday. As you can see, I've also made headway on putting them together.
On Tuesday I put in all the orders for hardware, and today the last package arrived! Sourcing the aluminum rails locally proved to be a great idea. It turns out that there's a local company called Admiral Metals that sold me full ten foot rails; this allowed me to avoid having a join in the long x-axis rails, which would most likely have caused a small bump. I also happend to run into a fellow CNC machinist while I was there who offered to help me machine any small parts I might need. I love this town.
I now have everything I need to finish the build; the only thing I have yet to get is an old computer to run the thing, but I've got several leads. Tomorrow is going to be a long work day.
I've decided that instead of going to the bay area for a month, I'm going to spend the entire quarter here in Boston, and then spend a few months in Oakland after I graduate.
Here's what happened: a few days ago I read on Because We Can's blog that they're offering a couple internships, one of which is focused on the use of CNC tech. As you can imagine, my first reaction was extreme interest, thinking I could do it right after I graduated, but after a few moments of consideration I decided that I'd probably be better off just going straight into business for myself.
A couple days later I found myself re-considering this internship. As it turns out, part of my resistance to it was the fact that I was very weary of becoming too interested in the bay area as a place to set up shop because I'm already in love with Boston. As I thought about this, I realized that this had caused me subconsciously to sabotage it's chances by only spending a month there, while giving Boston the better part of two. If instead I spent a full four months in Oakland, I'd be much more likely to get a more full picture of what living there was really like, and have more time to make the connections I would need. The more I thought about this idea, the more I liked it; even if I didn't get the internship it would still be a better plan. Another benefit would be that I would then be free to spend the full quarter here which, considering how long it's been taking to get the CNC up and running, would be very helpful.
After talking to several people about this plan and hearing no strong objections, and making sure my housemate wouldn't mind me staying an extra month, I decided to go ahead and put this plan into action. I'll miss not being able to see my father and step-mother for Thanksgiving, but being able to spend that much more time with them in the summer should make up for it.
Last night I finally started nailing and gluing boards together. Of course there was a last minute design change to the torsion box, but it was the awesome kind that cut down dramatically on weight, construction time, and material used. Put simply, I increased the space between ribs in the box, and made each row staggered from the one before it. This change is largely thanks to Edison, one of the guys at the Asylum. God, it's nice to have intelligent monkeys to bounce ideas off of! After I cut all the new short ribs and laid down some plastic to keep the box from getting glued to the concrete, I managed to get almost half of the thing built before I headed home for dinner.
The process of getting the gantry parts milled out, while complicated, is progressing nicely. When I went down to the SETC Thursday evening, there were indeed people there, and a shiny 4x8 ShopBot capable of doing all the cuts nicely. Unfortunately, the (one?) guy who can teach people how to use it was not there, and it was unclear when he might ever return to the SETC since he was currently in the middle of grad school. I did make some good contacts though, including one guy from a hackerspace near David Square called Sprout. I'm going to try to make it there sometime this week.
I also heard back from a guy I found through 100k garages who makes signs. His business is Village Sign Works, and it's run by a guy named Terry and his son. I drove up there Friday afternoon and spent some time discussing the job and generally talking shop. He seemed very eager to help me out. We couldn't get the g-code files I had from buildyourcnc.com to work with his system, so we decided that the best thing would be for me to take the DXFs I had, separate the cuts into layers based on depth of cut, and send those to him for an estimate. It's a good thing we did this, since an extra DXF I had also been sent turned out to contain several updated parts that I was strongly urged to use. I swapped out the old parts for the new, split everything into layers, and sent the revised DXF off to Terry. Hopefully I'll hear from him sometime today with an estimate and he'll be able to get cutting in the next day or so.
The CNC is coming along. We've settled on the BlackFoot design from buildyoucnc.com, and I've purchased the g-code files files for it. Before we build the mill though, we first have to make a table for it to go on, and the first part of that is making what is known as a torsion box. In turn, the first part of making a torsion box is having a flat, level surface on which to build it. To that end, a frame of 2x4s was bolted to the floor over plastic, and self-leveling concrete was poured in.
A torsion box is a long thin box containing a grid of boards that form a ridged lattice. This will insure that the table to of the CNC mill will always be flat. Right now I've got most of the parts of the torsion box cut out; I just need help cutting the long sides of the box along with the top. Once that's done I'll assemble the box, build the table, and then start building the CNC onto it.
In the mean time I need to find a place that already has a CNC machine that will cut the out the parts for mine for me. Some other people at the Asylum tried to scope out a possible place called the South End Technology Center, but when they went during posted open hours on Saturday, the place was closed. Hopefully it'll be open today.
On Sunday I met with several people from the Artisan's Asylum about building a CNC mill. Going into the meeting my plans and dreams looked something like this: if money was no object, I would build a small mill like the one I just made in Cincinnati, power it with overpowered electronics, use it to mill out precision parts for a larger mill that could handle a whole 4'x8' sheet of ply, build that, and then use the electronics from the first machine to power the second. When it would be time to return to Cincinnati I would rent a U-haul and take the larger machine with me, leaving the smaller one. Once reality set in, I decided that a more prudent thing to do would be to just make the smaller machine; building the larger one could wait until I was back in Cincinnati. Minutes into the meeting on Sunday, several things became clear:
- The Asylum guys saw no reason to make anything other than a full 4'x8' mill.
- One of them was already willing to buy the machine once I left town.
- Another said he knew of several places that would mill out parts the parts for us at cost.
!!!
This means that I'll get to build and have access to a full size CNC mill, not have to worry about getting it back to Cincinnati, and all it'll cost me in the end is my time and labor! This is better than I had dreamed of! Tonight we're meeting again to decide on a design to use, and possibly get started on the table that will hold the machine. Unless someone has found another well-tested design of the size we need, we'll probably be building this one.
In other news, this weekend I'm attending StrowlerCon, another Maker event of sorts where I have been assured I'll meet lots of awesome people.
Ye gods, I owe you people a report from D.C., don't I? I'd start a list of posts to do, but I'm afraid it would only encourage me to add to it rather than actually post.
