An IPhone Case Study

Way back in 2008, Apple unveiled the first unibody Macbook with a chassis milled out of a single block of aluminum. Before that, essentially all laptops, including those from Apple, were flimsy pla…

Rolling Your Own Ball Screws

We’ve got mixed feelings about a new video from [AndysMachines] that details how he makes custom ball screws. On the one hand, there’s almost zero chance that we’ll ever have an o…

Simple Pen Plotter Rolls On The Table

Pen plotters are popular builds amongst DIY CNC enthusiasts. They’re a great way to learn the fundamentals of motion control and make something useful along the way. In that vein, [Maker101] …

CNC Metal Forming

Forming complex shapes in metal sheets is still a laborious process, especially if you aren’t needing more than a couple parts so stamping doesn’t make sense. That may change with Digit…

A Beautiful Lamp-Inspired PC Case

Sometimes you see something super cool and think of how it would be really neat if applied in a totally different context. [MXC Builds] saw an awesome lamp from [karacreates], but decided it would …

Unusual Tool Gets An Unusual Repair

In today’s value-engineered world, getting a decade of service out of a cordless tool is pretty impressive. By that point you’ve probably gotten your original investment back, and if th…

Proxxon CNC Conversion Makes A Small Mill A Bit Bigger

The Proxxon MF70 mini-mill is a cheap and cheerful, but decently made little desktop mill. As such, it’s been the target of innumerable CNC-ification projects, including an official kit from the ma…

Building AI Models To Diagnose HVAC Issues

HVAC – heating, ventilation, and air conditioning – can account for a huge amount of energy usage of a building, whether it’s residential or industrial. Often it’s the major…

Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator

Designing a file to cut on a CNC is only part of the process. You also have to keep it in place while the machine does its work. [Garrett Fromme] walks us through five different work holding techni…

A LEGO CNC Pixel Art Generator

If you are ever lucky enough to make the trip to Bilund in Denmark, home of LEGO, you can have your portrait taken and rendered in the plastic bricks as pixel art. Having seen that on our travels w…

The Cheap CNC3018 Gets A Proper Revamp

Many people have been attracted to the low price and big dreams of the CNC3018 desktop CNC router. If you’re quick, you can pick one up on the usual second-hand sales sites with little wear a…

Betta Aims To Bring Wire EDM To The Desktop

Just as practical nuclear fusion has been “only 20 years away” for the last 80 years or so, the promise of electrical discharge machining (EDM) in the home shop seems to always be just …

Mostly Printed CNC Gets A Few Upgrades

The Mostly Printed CNC is famous for two things. First, being made mostly from 3D printed parts and commonly available steel tubing. Second, because of the materials used, its rigidity isn’t …

Plasma Cutter Gets CNC Treatment At Low Cost

[Daniel] has been metalworking on a budget for a while now. Originally doing things like plasma cutting on old bricks, he used his original plasma cutter to make an appropriate plasma cutting table…

Electromagnets Make Vertical CNC Cutter A Little Stickier

Workholding is generally not a problem on a big CNC plasma cutter.; gravity does a pretty good job of keeping heavy sheet steel in place on the bed. But what if your CNC table isn’t a table? …

A SPIF-fy Way Of Forming Metal

Thanks to 3D printing, most of us are familiar with the concept of additive manufacturing, and by extension, subtractive manufacturing. But what is it when you’re neither adding material nor …

Autofeeding CNC Lathe Cranks Out Parts All By Itself

The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-inten…

You Wouldn’t Download A House

Shelter is one of the most basic of human needs, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we continually come up with new ways to build homes. Most building systems are open source to an extent, an…

Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean

When you own an enormous CNC router, you’ve got to find projects that justify it. So why not shoot for the sky — literally — and build the 1980s-est possible thing: a full-scale f…

CNC Plus Microscope Plus Game Controller Equals Awesome

What do you get if you strap a microscope onto a CNC and throw in a gaming controller? The answer, according to Reddit user [AskewedBox] is something kind of awesome: you get a microscope that can …