Monday, January 9, 2017

A Handy Guide to CNC Machining, Mold Making, and Resin Casting

I had one of those unexpected repair/upkeep jobs pop up today that kept me from thinking too much about blogging, but as luck would have it, I also ran across a website called "Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting", subtitled "Home manufacturing tutorial for robot builders, model makers, and other hobbyists".  Since "making all kinds of stuff" is in my masthead, I consider this my beat (as the news guys say) and that my readers will probably be interested in it.

Regular readers will know that I'm rather familiar with this material, but there's a lot here I have never needed to study and therefore don't know.  Because the main goal is here is building robots and other models, there's a good section on creating gears.  I haven't done any gears yet, although I've read some about it. 

So if you're interested in how you get to something like this, go poke around and read as you'd like. 
A linked image of the kind of stuff the author of that page does.  Note the tiny gears in the planetary gear systems, cast from plastic resins.  Cool stuff!


6 comments:

  1. Oh, boy.....another one of "those sites" where I can lost for hours!

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  2. You might be interested in this site:

    http://www.gear2motion.com/

    Art Fenerty is the guy who started development on MACH CNC software, he sold it and is now doing this.

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    1. Thanks. I know Art by name, and started running Mach3 back in '06 or '07. Right now, I'm experimenting with LinuxCNC but that's because of computer issues. It's serviceable, and does what I need, but kind of clunky. They make you do two or three mouse clicks for something Mach does in one.

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  3. Like drjim said, except I finished today's high priority honeydew tasks before I headed for the link.

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  4. Ignore my last question, please. I was concentrated on the middle of the process. It looks like for the final molding he relies on a flat, weighted cover that (supposedly) won't leave much flash to clean off.

    I want to try this process sometime. It may be useful for casting smallish airfoil blades.

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