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] …

Gear Up: A 15-Minute Intro On Involute Gears

If you’re into CNC machining, mechanical tinkering, or just love a good engineering rabbit hole, you’re in for a treat. Substack’s [lcamtuf] has written a quick yet insightful 15-minute intro…

Towards Solderless PCB Prototyping

When we think of assembling a PCB, we’re almost always thinking about solder. Whether in paste form or on the spool, hand-iron or reflow, some molten metal is usually in the cards. [Stephen Hawes] …

Laser Cutters: Where’s The Point?

It is funny how when you first start doing something, you have so many misconceptions that you have to discard. When you look back on it, it always seems like you should have known better. That was…

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…

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? …

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…