overwhelmed neophyte

[fungi]

Hi all,
For my first required post, I guess I will give some history about how I got here, and ask for suggestions on where to go from here. At the present time I am basically an artist sculptor/mold maker and before I started the process described below, I thought my most immediate interest was in making award medallions (like 2-3 inch coins with letters and bas relief artwork) for our local dog club tournaments. Up til now, I have developed and used a time consuming multistep process: 1) the basic medallion shape from a plastic blank, 2) the words using a photopolymer, i.e. rubber stamp, 3) handcarved bas relief in wax and 4) after multiple rtv molds and plastic intermediates I finally arrive at a working master mold from which I cold cast multiple award medallions.

To speed up the process, I started looking into "rapid prototyping". When i saw the price I then started looking into building something that would suffice. When I saw that the likely time to completion/complexity were over my head, I started searching for an off the shelf proxy--affordable desktop cnc router or mill. Then my head exploded with all of the possibilities-jewelry, metal fabrication, big, little, hobby, making money.....

So here I am. Probably like many out there I am burningly anxious to get started immediately because I can see/dream about all that is cool about cnc/rapid prototyping, but I have no experience in cnc anything.

At the moment I am tormenting myself about possibly one of the K2 desktop cnc routers, or something off of ebay like the sable 2015, zenbot cnc mill/router.

Any help/suggestions on these or other machines would be greatly appreciated.

Steve M

[awerby]

For those, I'm not sure you'd get the required fineness of detail from one of those routers you mention. They are mostly intended for larger sorts of things, like signs and cut-out work. If jewelry-scale projects are mostly what you have in mind, something more like a Taig mill would probably be more appropriate. You can cut metals directly with one of them, or use wax, and run small tools that probably would just break if you put them in the hand-routers that the machines you're looking at use for spindles.

The Taig comes with a really nice closed-loop control system made by Microproto (their own CNC label) or if you want to save money you can get a CR ("Cnc-ready") mill and provide your own motors and control solution (the combination of Mach3 and the Gecko 540 has become pretty popular lately).

These mills also have a 4th axis option, which makes a lot of sculptural sorts of things possible that can't be done with 3 axes.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Originally Posted by fungi@uwyo.edu Hi all, For my first required post, I guess I will give some history about how I got here, and ask for suggestions on where to go from here. At the present time I am basically an artist sculptor/mold maker and before I started the process described below, I thought my most immediate interest was in making award medallions (like 2-3 inch coins with letters and bas relief artwork) for our local dog club tournaments. Up til now, I have developed and used a time consuming multistep process: 1) the basic medallion shape from a plastic blank, 2) the words using a photopolymer, i.e. rubber stamp, 3) handcarved bas relief in wax and 4) after multiple rtv molds and plastic intermediates I finally arrive at a working master mold from which I cold cast multiple award medallions. To speed up the process, I started looking into "rapid prototyping". When i saw the price I then started looking into building something that would suffice. When I saw that the likely time to completion/complexity were over my head, I started searching for an off the shelf proxy--affordable desktop cnc router or mill. Then my head exploded with all of the possibilities-jewelry, metal fabrication, big, little, hobby, making money..... So here I am. Probably like many out there I am burningly anxious to get started immediately because I can see/dream about all that is cool about cnc/rapid prototyping, but I have no experience in cnc anything. At the moment I am tormenting myself about possibly one of the K2 desktop cnc routers, or something off of ebay like the sable 2015, zenbot cnc mill/router. Any help/suggestions on these or other machines would be greatly appreciated. Steve M

[MattTheNoob]

There are many options as far as hardware, but you should start looking into the software required to generate the g-code for your models. Also many options, and many of them have trial versions. If you are not the computer-savvy type, you will need to become one.

Keep poking around this site. There are many folks doing what you discribe. There is a fellow named chris.botha (or something close to that) on the mach support forum (he may even frequent here as well), and he does beautiful, intricate, jewlery via CNC.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress.