I've just taken a new part time teaching job at our local community college. It is teaching CNC programming for lathes and mills. I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas for projects we could do. If I could have the prints that would be even better. They need to be pretty simple because this is a beginner class and it's only 16 class days long. Alright thank you.

Class days, or class hours? Sixteen days is over 120 hours of instruction. If each class is less than two hours long, like 55 minutes, there isn't a lot of projects you can do while teaching the basics. CNC is coding, running a machine, and the cutting variables of the tooling. If it is a basics course, you can really only teach them enough to be PHDs. Gloss over each area with an installed program in a machine to run the schools initials or name in small peices of aluminum.

How about letting the students make something useful, and possibly sell the items on CNCZone, to offset their tuition costs?

Bearing blocks for leadscrews, acme leadnuts, etc. are all essential components of homebuilt CNC routers. Your students might just get the CNC bug and decide to build their own!

Here's a link to a great site, it also has some prints of CNC components that your students may find interesting.

http://www.5bears.com/cnc.htm