I’ve been working on another dining table, this one a “Prairie Style” table for a client out of quartersawn white oak. The design includes a bunch of mortise and tenon joints, which of course I decided to cut on the ShopBot (is there another way?). A dilemma stemmed from my lack of either a …
Continue reading >>> Machining Solid Wood – Mortises
Occasionally I get to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing a long-term project come to fruition. I recently completed an odyssey that began over 5 years ago when a large black oak tree fell over across the street from my house, and ended recently with the completion of a twelve-sided dining table.
I had …
Continue reading >>> My Magnum Opus
There are lots of times when you want to be just as clever and creative as you can be when you’re designing a project, and others when you just want something that solves the problem…something simple. Just recently I was asked to come up with some outdoor seating for the Maker Faire in Austin, …
Continue reading >>> Something Simple
I’ve probably been making things with a ShopBot as long as anyone, except of course for Ted. I got one of the first tools…so early in ShopBot’s history that Ted came to my shop to help put my ShopBot together!… but by the end of the first week had already cut the parts …
Continue reading >>> A ShopBotting Dinosaur Evolves
Those that know me will tell you that I can’t help much with creating fancy 3d files or things like lithophanes to cut on your ShopBot, but I have made a heck of a lot of “stuff”…things that have a somewhat practical use like boats and furniture and clocks and such. It seems like …
Continue reading >>> Making Stuff …
I’ll talk a bit more about development at ShopBot and expand the ‘resolution’ theme from last month, more broadly taking up the issue of smoothness in cutting with ShopBots, and specifically reporting on some progress we are making. For a number of months now, we have focused software development on creating strategies for smoother …
Continue reading >>> Circle Smoothness 'beta'
Ever since we upgraded our website this Spring, I’ve wanted a space to write about the things that are going on at ShopBot. It’s a bit of a busy place, but also exciting. And, we are certainly hard at work developing new CNC stuff. I’ll try to make a contribution every month or so …
Continue reading >>> My First Post
In the last Bill’s corner we learned how to manually create part files by typing in commands, and to automate the process using the Part File Assembler. Now I know you all agree with me that this could be pretty powerful stuff, but what can we really do with it that we can’t do …
Continue reading >>> Exploring ShopBot Part Files 2 …
Many ShopBotters are happy creating their part files in a program like Part Wizard and never really looking at the part file that’s created, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Part Wizard and similar programs use something called a Post Processor or “Post” for short to create the commands to move your …
Continue reading >>> Exploring ShopBot Part Files …
If you’re like me you’ve come across situations where you’ve had something that you wanted to cut…maybe something like a piece of molding or a boat rudder…that had the same cross-section along its length. This happened to me recently when a contractor brought me a piece of door corner trim from an old house …
Continue reading >>> The Extruder…how to squeeze molding and other odd shapes out of your ShopBot!
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