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? …

Modular Vacuum Table Custom-Fits The Parts

[enhydra] needed to modify a bunch of side inserts from some cheap ABS enclosures, and to save time and effort, he created a simple vacuum table with swappable inserts to precisely fit the parts. S…

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…

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…

Wooden Game Boy Is A Challenging Intro CNC Project

[Sebastian] describes himself as “a total noob” when it comes to CNC, so in an attempt to get to know his new CNC router, he chose about the most complex possible project — replic…

What The Artisan 3-in-1 CNC Offers (If One Has The Table Space)

I never feel like I have enough space in my workshop. The promise of consolidating tools to make the most of limited space drew me to the Snapmaker Artisan, a plus-sized 3-in-1 tool combining 3D pr…

Lessons Learned While Building A DIY Pen Plotter

There was a time when plotters were the pinnacle of computer graphics output. While they aren’t as common as they used to be, there are some advantages to having a plotter. [Symon] wanted a p…

CNC Soldering Bot Handles Your Headers

Soldering pin headers by hand is a tedious task, especially when your project has a huge number of them. [iforce2d] has a large number of boards with a lot of headers, and has created a rather spec…

Simple Add-On Makes Cheap Plasma Cutter Suitable For CNC Use

Plasma cutters are ridiculously cheap these days, just cruise by the usual online sources or your local Harbor Freight if you’ve got any doubt about that. But “cheap” and “g…

String Art Build Uses CNC To Make Stringy Art

String art is as old as, well, string and something to hang it from. But, like most things, it gets more enjoyable when you involve a CNC. [Paul MH] went the whole hog with this build, creating a C…

Impulse Buying A 3040 CNC Machine, What Could Go Wrong?

[joekutz] made an impulse purchase of a CNC machine. It was a 3040 CNC that looked reasonably complete and had an attractive price, what could possibly go wrong? As it happens, [joekutz] really did…

Throw FreeCAD Some Curves

[Mango Jelly] got a question from someone trying to model a phone box with a complex curved roof. We have to admit that when we saw it, we knew it would be hard to model well. Naturally, there are …

GrblHAL CNC Controller Based On RP2040 Pico

[Phil Barrett] designed a new CNC controller breakout board called the PicoCNC which uses the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 module and grblHAL. It packs a bunch of features typical of these controllers,…

Adding Two Axes Makes CNC Router More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

The problem with building automated systems is that it’s hard to look at any problem and not see it in terms of possible automation solutions. Come to think of it, that’s probably less …

Spindle Upgrade Makes PocketNC Faster And Smoother

Conventional wisdom says that rigidity is the name of the game when it comes to machine tool performance. After all, there’s got to be a reason for CNC machines that need specialized rigging …

Automate Away The Drudgery Of CNC Manufacturing

One of the keys to making money with manufacturing is to find something that you can make a lot of. Most small manufacturers have one or two “bread and butter” items that can be cranked…

Mat Boards Are Spendy, So DIY CNC Tool To The Rescue

Mats are flat pieces of paper-based material that fill the space between a frame and the art within. They perform a number of aesthetic and practical functions, and they can also be expensive to pu…

Learn How Impossibly Close-fitting Parts Are Actually Made

Most of us have seen those demonstrations of metal parts that mate together so finely that, once together, they have no visible seam at all. But how, exactly, is this done? [Steve Mould] has a vide…

CNC Feeds And Speeds, Explained As A First-Timer

If you’ve ever looked into CNC cutting tools, you’ve probably heard the term “feeds and speeds”. It refers to choosing the speed at which to spin the cutting tool, and how f…