G-Wizard Calculator 1.600 Is Available for Download

Release 1.600 is a feature release:
- Added a new tool type for lathes: Parting/Grooving. Nothing too special here, just support for a very common operation on lathes. The hints will remind you that you can run OD grooving (not parting) a little bit faster than ID grooving.
- Reworked the adjustments to spindle HP and added a new type. You now have 3 choices:
- No Adjustment: Use the peak power at all times.
- Weight Adjusted: Look at the machine’s envelope and weight and de-rate lighter weight machines. Folks with small machines like Taigs, Sherlines, and the smallest Siegs report this helps a lot.… Read the rest

Hossmachine’s 5-Axis Mini-Mill

Hoss is a professional machinist by day, and one of the all time great “hobby” machinists in his spare time. I use that word “hobby” only in the sense that Hoss obviously loves to do it, and not because he isn’t a full-on pro 24 x 7. Every now and then I check in on what Hoss has been up to and I am always surprised by the number of ambitious projects he has undertaken and gotten done. Getting them done is the most amazing of all. I have a shop full of projects waiting to get done and I frankly don’t understand how he manages to do all of it.… Read the rest

We’ve Put You On Our Map!

Check the bottom of the CNC Cookbook Home Page to see a rotating globe that plots where our most recent visitors are from. It’s cool to watch the visitors showing up from all over the world. I just got two from Finland and one from Scotland as I sit here writing this.
Thanks for putting me onto the globe, Hoss! … Read the rest

Give Us Your Take on Multi-Axis Machining (aka Who’s Doin’ the Fancy Stuff???)

Things are going a bit slow over on our Multi-Axis Machining Survey. Yes, we’ve got participation, but not nearly as much as for most of the other surveys. Inquiring minds want to know who’s doin’ the fancy stuff. Please give us a sense of your experience machining with more than the usual number of axes!

Hey, multi-axis doesn’t have to be CNC!… Read the rest

Organize Your Tool Holders in Old Filing Cabinets

Loved this tip from Rosie’s Shack over on PM:

Use old filing cabinets to organize tool holders…
Track down some old filing cabinets at auctions, Craigslist, or wherever and you have a ready made way to organize your tool holders. Add some free software from Tool Wall (it’s free for the first 160 tools) and you’ve added a lot of organization. I haven’t played with the Tool Wall software yet, but I’ve heard good things from various sources. I need to up my own tooling organization as I’ve blown past the capacity of my table top rack by about 2-3x since I built it.… Read the rest

CNC Skull Candy for Halloween

Here’s a non-tool CNC project I found on MAKEzine. I love it because it combines workshop skills used in a novel way with another of my favorite pasttimes: cooking. I’ve seen articles before that are similar. The idea is to use the CNC to create a food mold of some kind. In this case, they’ve made these wonderful little white chocolate skulls and used a walnut for the brain. Cool!

Full details on how these were made are in the MAKEzine article. In this case, the artist sculpted the skulls from polymer clay and then made a silicone mold from the clay.… Read the rest

Kinetic Gear Sculptures for the Desk

When people hear I have a machine shop, invariably they want to know what I make. And my answer tends to be “tools”. The discussion rapidly goes circular, since the curious onlooker wants to know what all the tools are going to be used to make. Making “tools” for their own sake seems not to be a real answer for the layman. That’s okay, the beautiful thing about a machine shop is you start to realize there isn’t much you couldn’t make, it’s more a matter of what captures your imagination enough to be worth the time.… Read the rest

CNCCookbook Gets a Guest Posting on CNCMentor

I wanted to give a shout out to go check out the CNCMentor site. It’s got tons of articles for people who are building CNC machines. They just did a repost of one our Cookbook articles on backlash.
If you run a site and you’re wondering how the whole guest posting business works, it’s pretty simple. Periodically I’ll approach site owners when I see a really cool article and ask to repost it to CNCCookbook. We did that for example with Grzsoftware’s (the MeshCAM folks) excellent article on how to choose a stepover.… Read the rest

The Ultimate Jewelry for a Machinist? Check Out the Gear Ring

Thanks to Make Magazine for pointing out this very cool product:… Read the rest

We’ve Gathered Our Surveys on a Page

We do surveys fairly frequently here on CNCCookbook, so I thought I’d make a page where you can access all the surveys in one place. You can find it on the navigation bar to the left. Just click the entry labeled “Surveys.”… Read the rest

Used CNC Machine Prices Skyrocket Despite Economy

Came across an interesting article on Practical Machinist talking about how hight the prices on CNC machines have gotten. It’s interesting to puzzle it out. The posters seem to feel that shops are busy right now, and there is a real shortage of new machines available, so the used ones are fetching a premium right now. There is also a sense of lots of new small shops are cranking up.

If this is all true, then things are good for manufacturing right now, despite the number of people still out of jobs and the problems in other segments.… Read the rest

G-Wizard Editor is getting Markers on the Backplot and a lot of other cool features!

We’ve added a lot of new features in the latest release of G-Wizard Editor and Simulator (that would be release 0.400), so I wanted to share some with you.
First up, we’ve added Markers to the backplot:

Markers show where the g-code starts, where it ends, and the position of the currently highlighted line of g-code.
Got a little bug where it’s showing 2 markers for the current g-code line!
I’ve outlined the markers in red so you can see them in the screenshot above. The g-code program drops down to X0Y0Z0 and then draws three sides of a square.… Read the rest

A Tale of Two Crankshafts: 4th Axis Machining Videos

I came across these two videos by accident while researching something else, but they’re interesting. Crankshafts seem like the poster children of less-than-obvious machining work, so here are two different examples at radically different scales and costs of how to go about it.
First up is a German Golmatic CNC mill being used to machine the crankshaft for a model of a Boxer 6 cylinder engine:

Machining a crankshaft with a 4th axis…
I couldn’t find any more information on this interesting project, so I don’t know if the engine was ever completed or not.… Read the rest

CNC for Knife Makers

John Grimsmo is a G-Wizard trial user who recently sent me links to his blog and YouTube video channel. Some very cool stuff up there for folks who’d like to be making custom knives with their CNC’s. That’s a project I hope to get to at some point (never enough time!). Anyway, here is a composite video showing a bunch of the steps for a set of custom aluminum scales (the handles of a knife):

Custom knife scales with a hobby CNC…
John’s machine is a nice straightforward conversion–the kind that isn’t too costly and is within the reach of most any hobbyist.… Read the rest

CNC for Knife Makers

John Grimsmo is a G-Wizard trial user who recently sent me links to his blog and YouTube video channel. Some very cool stuff up there for folks who’d like to be making custom knives with their CNC’s. That’s a project I hope to get to at some point (never enough time!). Anyway, here is a composite video showing a bunch of the steps for a set of custom aluminum scales (the handles of a knife):

Custom knife scales with a hobby CNC…
John’s machine is a nice straightforward conversion–the kind that isn’t too costly and is within the reach of most any hobbyist.… Read the rest