makezine.com: My friend Andy Holtin, an amazing maker and an art professor at American University, sent me the details of a simple jig that he bodged together to turn his ShopBot into a pen plotter. While adapting plotter pens to CNC routers is not uncommon, I like the adapter he made (originally to hold a rotary tool) and how he made a secondary pen adapter to fit inside.
4 comments:
While I think that this is cool, and definitely a channel of thinking that can produce a lot of really useful and/or interesting modifications to a CNC machine, I fail to see the benefits of this method of plotting over printing to the plotter. It seems to me that It would take multiple passes to plot things with multiple colors, that the pen might lose contact with the material, and that you just add many more modes of failure. What I do think this can be applied to is if you need to verify your cut file, put a piece of paper down instead of your material and plot it out to see that everything is working the way you expect it to if you don’t want to waste a piece of test material. What excites me about this thinking are the other types of modifications you can put on your CNC, the article mentions dremel mods and what not, I suppose that there are far more that you could conceive to make your life easier, that is if you want to risk modifying your nice CNC router.
While this is a really interesting way to make art, it seems almost pointless. You still have to draw everything in CAD or a similar program. Offsetting the pen from the chuck so it can have a spring stabilizer to account for the variation in the material is really interesting and if you’re going to use your CNC to draw, I suppose it would be a necessary step.
The more I think about it, the more this would actually be nice for Paints to use because they could plot out the outlines for a set piece (like the owl on the Seven Guitars set or the yellow words on the Full Monty set, though those were on corrugated steel) and skip the step of hand drawing it or making a stencil. Even then though, this adapter for the CNC is for a pen, and you usually don’t want to be drawing with pen if you’re going to be doing scenic painting on top.
Any type of CNC-based machine that runs on a X, Y, Z axes can perform this type of task. You would probably think to just throw the pen into the chuck and call it a day, and I can’t disagree with you, that seem like a viable solution. Likewise, the article is also right by saying that not every surface is going to be level and an adapted penholder with a spring mechanism would solve your problem of not having constant contact with the surface. But riddle me this, you put this fancy contraption onto your router and all is good until you tell the head of the router to go to specific point, the CNC has no idea you have strapped an adapter to it. Now one might say that you can just compensate for this, but what if you get thrown off the machine and have to pick up where you left off, there is not way, and I mean NO WAY you will get that back to the same point, so you’d better be ready to be in it for the long haul or else finish that project when you start it. Now don’t get me wrong --I think this attachment is very cool and now brings CNC routing into the pen world, but in my past experience I try to stay away from modifying any type of CNC-based machine.
I do not totally understand the point of a CNC drawing tool, but I am sure there are good reasons. Perhaps you want to draw and intricate shape to cut, no, just cut it with the CNC. Maybe for labeling? I doubt hand written isn’t good enough. I am not saying this is not a cool idea because I think it really is. Yes you can just plot something on the printer, but there is something about perfectly pen or pencil drawn shape. You could totally try to convince someone you actually drew one of those precise gears because they could see it is pencil drawn on wood. Perhaps this could be something we try in advanced fabrication with Ben. I am sure he would love to try. My only thought is when humans write we angle our writing utensil. A CNC does not do that which might lead to breaking the tip or damaging it in some other way resulting in a bad line. But the article says this idea works so I say it is worth a try.
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