Saturday, October 03, 2015
Tormach unveils a truly capable desktop CNC machine
www.gizmag.com: The maker community is turning into a quickly-growing movement, as shown by the ever-expanding Maker Faires popping up worldwide. This last weekend was World Maker Faire in New York, where Tormach, a company known for making small, affordable CNC machine tools announced an even smaller, more personal mill, the PCNC 440.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I’ve been keeping an eye out for a Tabletop CNC router/mill, just because I think it would be cool to have.
I don’t know what the market it for this type of machine. I supposed there’s small run fabrication and manufacturing, and also office R&D.
Can you imagine every technical design office having one of these? Just for making a prototype or a single part? It would be pretty cool.
As far as the unit goes, this one seems to be the first real “shop grade” machine that can stand up to serious work for a serious amount of time.
For about 500 bucks, anybody can build something that routes plastic automagically, for 10 times that, you can have a pretty serious looking CNC milling machine next to your computer.
I bet the coolant would smell bad though.
Oh man this is exciting. Like Frank said weird market though. Its high end enough to be appealing to people who need something professional but don't have a ton of money to spend on it. But it is just out of reach of individuals who might want one. Bring the price down a couple thousand and its between that and a nice bike. I'm excited at the massive price drop though. This is almost a 10 fold drop in price from its nearest competitor. There is a pretty good chance that this will encourage a change in the market. To keep up competitors are also going to work on professional CNC machines at a low cost. Maybe it will explode like the 3-D printing market. I could see a lot of hobbyists picking one up if they could get it under $1000. A good day for capitalism.
CNC machines are quickly revolutionizing every aspect of the manufacturing, prototyping, and scenery markets. Particularly in the theatre CNC router’s have begun to transform our abilities to do detailed and complex patterns as well as expediting the process of making large scale curves that come together for a perfect fit in load in. Tasks that might have taken a very skilled carpenter several days can simply be loaded onto the machine directly from the designer’s drawings and be ready for paint in a few hours. Not only that but the precision of that work can be measured in the hundredths of an inch rather than sixteenths. This new CNC machine however begins to bring CNC into the three dimensional world at a price point that is affordable for small businesses. While it’s cutting area may be slightly disappointing to some it’s uses for prototyping and small scale manufacturing will likely blow us away once it reaches our shops.
Reading this article, I am reminded of how much progress we've made in fabrication since the days of the craftsmen of yore. My father, himself a machinist, will go on tangents over the dinner table about re-calibrating lathes by hand, and working with his infamous boss "Cat-Man-Do," who was apt to dip his arms in mercury to cool down after a long day at the refinery. Those days are over, however, as inventions like these take away the need for the burly guy in the machine shop, who knows how to get the finicky drill press going, and what to do when the inspector comes round. In this age of 3D printers and robot manufacturing, it's easy to forget that there were once, and in some cases, still are, people who used to do these things. This comment, as small as it may be, is for them, the men and women who toiled in shops to help us achieve the technological advancement that pervades our world now.
CNC is still a relatively new term, although it has been around for a long time it has only recently become easily accessible to the general public. My dads company sell the software that controls CNC based machines and I remember when he would show me pictures of products his customers made with these computer guided machines. I’ve begun to realize that he is showing less and less because of how common this it has become. I am a student at CMU were we have access to laser cutters and CNC machines and almost every student knows how to “CAD” up an object and cut it out. I am not surprised to see that companies have released an “affordable” CNC machine would catch the excitement of the public. I use that term affordable loosely, mainly because the $7000 price tag isn’t exactly something your average consumer is going to shell out for something you will probably use twice a year. My advice is take your cnc projects to a machining shop and have them do it for you.
Post a Comment