Hackaday: I was in Pasadena CA for the Hackaday Superconference, and got to spend some quality time at the Supplyframe Design Lab. Resident Engineer Dan Hienzsch said I could have a few hours, and asked me what I wanted to make. The constraints were that it had to be small enough to fit into checked luggage, but had to be cool enough to warrant taking up Dan’s time, with bonus points for me learning some new skills. I have a decent wood shop at home, and while my 3D printer farm isn’t as pro as the Design Lab’s, I know the ropes. This left one obvious choice: something Jolly Wrencher on the industrial Tormach three-axis CNC metal mill.
2 comments:
This was a really cool article and made some points that I knew in the back of my head, but never really thought of fully. First, the main broad point, CNC is not fully autonomous. You still need experience, know how, and a good feel to be a good machinist even if you are using the most sophisticated machine on the market. From CAD to the finish pass there are thousands of things that could go wrong that would mess up your product. I think we might sometimes take CNC milling and routing for granted, but I also think we don’t appreciate the skill enough. Sure, you need more skill to carefully carve out a complex shape in aluminum on a manual mill than you do when a program is running the cutter heads motion, but there is still skill that you need to have. Anyone can hit the green button on the CNC router, but it is up to the people drawing and tool pathing the file to make sure what they are creating will come out right and be done efficiently. This is a set of skills and one I am very glad to have learned.
Williams makes a great point at the end of the article: metal workers nee not be worried that machines and robots are taking over their jobs. Machinists need the same knowledge of metal, metal working, plus a through knowledge of machining to work supposedly fully automated machines. The CNC simply takes away the unnecessarily time consuming tasks of making perfectly complex shapes. A perfect example of this is BinhAn's guess who project. The fist day she worked on it, she spent about 4 hours etching a border into the plexiglass she was using for her placemat. The second day, she decided to laser cut her design into the plexi. The actual cutting time was minimal, but she still spent hours perfecting her design in vectorworks. The time she spent on the project was better allocated: more towards the design than the actual labor. The final project was amazing, and I urge the CMU community to check out our final design projects in the light lab.
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