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Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

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Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#11

Post by sottol »

syntaxing wrote: post #7

Former MechE for a decade and I owned personal CNC routers and on my 6th 3D printer. The biggest issue with CNC is the cost for consumables and accessories. Need a special bit? $$$ Need stock to cut? $$$ Want a nice ER11 or R2 collet set? $$$. A nice vise? $$$ Cut something wrong with a carbide bit? Shrapnel explosion. 3D printing has a bunch of limitations but is a way better machine for hobbyist. But I have been ey…

It is definitely more expensive than 3d printing in terms of consumables but china/aliexpress has really good hobby-quality equipment now - if you don't mind the country of origin. Many of their coated end-mills are decent and Maybe not stuff you would want to run professionally but it works quite well in a hobbyist setting and a mistake won't cost you $50.

I also looked into the Millenium Milo, only downside for me and kinda why I decided to design my own Voron V0-ish sized mini CNC machine was the really large footprint for about 3x the work volume (work _area_ is ~2x afair). An enclosed Milo would take up about the same volume as two 350mm Voron's side-by-side. So footprint of a small desk.

Imo besides the price, the other big factor is just how much less forgiving CNC machining is than 3d printing - so many mistakes you can make, zeroing the WCS, wrong WCS, mounting the work different than you had it in CAM, ... bam, at least the work is ruined. That's kind of another longer-term goal with my CNC machine, reducing some of these errors if possible with a web-based UI and maybe some computer vision. But that's far off, I'm currently playing with using a camera for work-probing/WCS-zeroing and it's sloooow progress :')

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#12

Post by [deleted] »

sottol wrote: post #5

Shameless plug if anyone is interested - I'm working on a $600-ish open-source, reasonably capable, but small and somewhat "tidy" hobby CNC machine with BOM cost around $600 that requires some DIYing. It's meant to be an alternative to the Desktop CNCs like Nomad, Carvera, Bantam, ... moreso than a PCNC or other proper entry-level CNC. The ultimate goal is to make it hobbyist-friendly, capable of easily cutting alumi…

[deleted]

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#13

Post by mdorazio »

sottol wrote: post #5

Shameless plug if anyone is interested - I'm working on a $600-ish open-source, reasonably capable, but small and somewhat "tidy" hobby CNC machine with BOM cost around $600 that requires some DIYing. It's meant to be an alternative to the Desktop CNCs like Nomad, Carvera, Bantam, ... moreso than a PCNC or other proper entry-level CNC. The ultimate goal is to make it hobbyist-friendly, capable of easily cutting alumi…

What's the advantage of this over a 3018 or 3030 machine? With some basic upgrades (you mentioned needing to diy anyway) you can easily cut aluminum on those for $500 or less.

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#15

Post by Joel_Mckay »

syntaxing wrote: post #7

Former MechE for a decade and I owned personal CNC routers and on my 6th 3D printer. The biggest issue with CNC is the cost for consumables and accessories. Need a special bit? $$$ Need stock to cut? $$$ Want a nice ER11 or R2 collet set? $$$. A nice vise? $$$ Cut something wrong with a carbide bit? Shrapnel explosion. 3D printing has a bunch of limitations but is a way better machine for hobbyist. But I have been ey…

A reasonable quality plasma-cutter CNC table offers the speed and low operational cost most fabricators can manage well.

Having a CNC Router table in a non-industrial zoned area will not work for most people. Services like sendcutsend.com makes life so much easier... =3

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#17

Post by syntaxing »

sottol wrote: post #11
syntaxing wrote: post #7

Former MechE for a decade and I owned personal CNC routers and on my 6th 3D printer. The biggest issue with CNC is the cost for consumables and accessories. Need a special bit? $$$ Need stock to cut? $$$ Want a nice ER11 or R2 collet set? $$$. A nice vise? $$$ Cut something wrong with a carbide bit? Shrapnel explosion. 3D printing has a bunch of limitations but is a way better machine for hobbyist. But I have been ey…

It is definitely more expensive than 3d printing in terms of consumables but china/aliexpress has really good hobby-quality equipment now - if you don't mind the country of origin. Many of their coated end-mills are decent and Maybe not stuff you would want to run professionally but it works quite well in a hobbyist setting and a mistake won't cost you $50. I also looked into the Millenium Milo, only downside for me…

Have you seen the Carvera Air? Not gonna lie, I'm equally tempted but that price point is tough to swallow. Its about $7-800 more than the Milo but has a bunch of things built in that you would probably would enjoy like touch probe leveling and camera zeroing. Its the "Bambulab" of the CNC world.

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#18

Post by syntaxing »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #15
syntaxing wrote: post #7

Former MechE for a decade and I owned personal CNC routers and on my 6th 3D printer. The biggest issue with CNC is the cost for consumables and accessories. Need a special bit? $$$ Need stock to cut? $$$ Want a nice ER11 or R2 collet set? $$$. A nice vise? $$$ Cut something wrong with a carbide bit? Shrapnel explosion. 3D printing has a bunch of limitations but is a way better machine for hobbyist. But I have been ey…

A reasonable quality plasma-cutter CNC table offers the speed and low operational cost most fabricators can manage well. Having a CNC Router table in a non-industrial zoned area will not work for most people. Services like sendcutsend.com makes life so much easier... =3

I was in charge of one of these when I was way younger and they are awesome. Downside is that I don't want to house Argon and they're such a pain to maintain. Getting parts ordered is definitely magnitudes more efficient and significantly cheaper nowadays. You can get really nicely machined and anodized parts from China for the same cost as custom part shipping cost here in the states, it's crazy.

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#19

Post by fn-mote »

99_00 wrote: post #14

It’s hard for me to believe that using a CNC to mill a model for resin casting works better than 3D printing it and casting it. I’d expect that with 3D printing you can even print the spruce and risers.

For one thing, IME with cheap hobbyist 3d printers (e.g., Ender printing PLA), the article is dead on about accuracy... people say 3d printers are good for 0.1mm but I don't know how long they spend tuning the machine. I mean, they are... kind of... just not reliably. CNC accuracy of 0.025mm is much easier to achieve (IME).

If you mean to tell me that I should just have a resin printer to start with, well I agree but I think we should be specific about what kind of 3D printing we are discussing.

Remember, the guide was written over a decade ago. Certainly 3d printing has gotten better, cheaper, and a lot more reliable. Resin is really strong, though.

Re: Hobby CAD, CNC machining, and resin casting (2015)

#20

Post by WillAdams »

99_00 wrote: post #14

It’s hard for me to believe that using a CNC to mill a model for resin casting works better than 3D printing it and casting it. I’d expect that with 3D printing you can even print the spruce and risers.

That was written before resin printers were affordably available or input shaping and so forth had made such a leap in print quality for fused filament printers --- that said, I get much better surface finishes on my CNC machines than my 3D printers, and casting will reproduce even the tiniest imperfection.
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