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I always call where I live a little town, but it's really a small city of 40 000 people. A year or so ago, a group took over an old school building and reinvented it as a STEAM center and maker space. For a membership fee, you can visit and use the facilites and the tools they have there, and get a discount on classes that they run. I've watched it with interest, even stopping in once to get more information and they took me and my unruly children on a tour. I really loved the idea of something like that and was definitely interested in joining, but money has been tight. For my birthday my mother got me a membership. I did the mandatory safety training the next week, but weird schedules and their very limited hours meant that the first time I could return was Thursday. I tried several other times, but something always took prescidence.
One of the main objectives of the center is giving the community access to tools that would otherwise be too costly or too large a footprint for a typical household to own. Some are more mundane, like a drill press or a table saw, but the biggest draws are the tech machines. They have two different styles of 3D printers, a laser cutter, and a CNC, which is the one that is relevent here. For those who aren't obsessive tool nerds, a CNC is pretty much a computer driven woodworking router, which is similar to a dremel tool. You run a program and it cuts out or carves what you tell it to in the software on a variety of different materials. The rig they have is quite large, it's a Shapeoko XXL with a Makita motor that will accept bits from 1/8" to 1/4". The bed itself can accept peices to cut as large as 33" to a side and as thick as three inches, and according to the website costs over $1800, so this is not something that I could probably ever own, short of a lottery win, because of borh price and the fact it would take over my entire workshop.
In order to use it, you had to design your stone in a program that can save in SVG (I used inkscape - it's easy and free), then import into carbide create(free from the manufacturer's website) and set up the toolpaths, and then export into a gcode, which is what carbide motion needs to direct the router motor. You then have to load your workpeice along the marks so that the bottom left corner is lined up to where the machine expects it to be. Load your bit, changing the collet if necessary, and zero out the z axis on the top of your material. Then you turn on the router motor, and start the program.
Here's a short video of it carving part of the epitaph. I would lower your volume - there's not much to hear other than the roar of the motor and the shopvac, and they're quite loud. https://youtu.be/pPPid0pYXsY
That's the cliff notes version. There are a lot of moving parts and it's easy to forget something and muck up, and I made my share of them.
To be fair, I made those mistakes on different peices, but it's left me with interesting results.
First, there's the off center epitaph:
![Text Wall]()
Then there's the centered epitaph that is too faint, surrounded by a shallow groove that should have cut out the stone
![Electronics Text Font Technology]()
and finally, the fully cut out stone back with outlined instead of rastered PVC channels.
![Drawing Sketch Design Paper Wood]()
So i've decided to flip the peice that has the too-light epitaph, and put an entirely different epitaph on it, and take the bit with the off center
but well carved epitaph and make that into a stone of its own.
So - is this going to take the place of the dremel and jigsaw?
Well, I think the answer is no. For a variety of reasons. Cost is one. I discovered on the way out that only the first hour I was on the CNC was covered under my membership, and I had to pay separately for each hour after that, and the same goes with the laser cutter and the 3d printers. 1 hour on each per month included, and $5/hour after that. Yeah, it's not a huge amount of money, but when you add that to their very limited hours and the logistics of even getting there for me it doesn't make it worth it to continue my membership right now. Plus, when you get down to it, there's nothing that it did that I couldn't do. It does it more neatly than I do with a handheld tool, but not so much that I'm willing to pay money when I'm pretty broke just now. It was fun though, and I'm glad I did it, but I will let the membership lapse for now, and see where it goes. It's a new facility, it's hopefully going to grow and expand. Maybe when my finances are better and the girls are older and have their own projects to do we can get a family membership going, they have lots of things for kids, but for right now, it's not for me.
One of the main objectives of the center is giving the community access to tools that would otherwise be too costly or too large a footprint for a typical household to own. Some are more mundane, like a drill press or a table saw, but the biggest draws are the tech machines. They have two different styles of 3D printers, a laser cutter, and a CNC, which is the one that is relevent here. For those who aren't obsessive tool nerds, a CNC is pretty much a computer driven woodworking router, which is similar to a dremel tool. You run a program and it cuts out or carves what you tell it to in the software on a variety of different materials. The rig they have is quite large, it's a Shapeoko XXL with a Makita motor that will accept bits from 1/8" to 1/4". The bed itself can accept peices to cut as large as 33" to a side and as thick as three inches, and according to the website costs over $1800, so this is not something that I could probably ever own, short of a lottery win, because of borh price and the fact it would take over my entire workshop.
In order to use it, you had to design your stone in a program that can save in SVG (I used inkscape - it's easy and free), then import into carbide create(free from the manufacturer's website) and set up the toolpaths, and then export into a gcode, which is what carbide motion needs to direct the router motor. You then have to load your workpeice along the marks so that the bottom left corner is lined up to where the machine expects it to be. Load your bit, changing the collet if necessary, and zero out the z axis on the top of your material. Then you turn on the router motor, and start the program.
Here's a short video of it carving part of the epitaph. I would lower your volume - there's not much to hear other than the roar of the motor and the shopvac, and they're quite loud. https://youtu.be/pPPid0pYXsY
That's the cliff notes version. There are a lot of moving parts and it's easy to forget something and muck up, and I made my share of them.
- forgetting to save the carbide create c2d file - needed to determine what bit I'd chosen and that was impossible to determine from the gcode.
- Forgetting that I don't tell the machine where the foam is, I have to line it up with marks on the wasteboard so it is where the machine expects it to be.
- getting impatient and not being precise about setting the z axis.
- not checking what material the program was assuming you were using and manually overriding the pass depth since there isn't a setting for foam.
- Not setting the PVC channels to raster. It outlined them, but did not remove the waste material as I was expecting it to.
To be fair, I made those mistakes on different peices, but it's left me with interesting results.
First, there's the off center epitaph:
Then there's the centered epitaph that is too faint, surrounded by a shallow groove that should have cut out the stone
and finally, the fully cut out stone back with outlined instead of rastered PVC channels.
So i've decided to flip the peice that has the too-light epitaph, and put an entirely different epitaph on it, and take the bit with the off center
but well carved epitaph and make that into a stone of its own.
So - is this going to take the place of the dremel and jigsaw?
Well, I think the answer is no. For a variety of reasons. Cost is one. I discovered on the way out that only the first hour I was on the CNC was covered under my membership, and I had to pay separately for each hour after that, and the same goes with the laser cutter and the 3d printers. 1 hour on each per month included, and $5/hour after that. Yeah, it's not a huge amount of money, but when you add that to their very limited hours and the logistics of even getting there for me it doesn't make it worth it to continue my membership right now. Plus, when you get down to it, there's nothing that it did that I couldn't do. It does it more neatly than I do with a handheld tool, but not so much that I'm willing to pay money when I'm pretty broke just now. It was fun though, and I'm glad I did it, but I will let the membership lapse for now, and see where it goes. It's a new facility, it's hopefully going to grow and expand. Maybe when my finances are better and the girls are older and have their own projects to do we can get a family membership going, they have lots of things for kids, but for right now, it's not for me.
