Pretty excited about this bad boy! It's a special type of dial indicator that can read in three dimensions. It will be very useful for helping me do precision setups on my machining center!

#cnc #instamachinist #machineshop

Photo by Aaron Gough on April 30, 2015.
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My #fadal VMC10 is helping me out with some woodworking today! Have to make some new workbenches, here it's drilling a pattern of holes for some dowels!

This is so much faster than doing all these by hand, and much more fun too!

This is actually the first time I'm making chips with the machine, pretty exciting!

#cnc #instamachinist #machineshop #machining


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New compressor day! This 5 horsepower beast is made in Canada by Canbuilt. This is one of the final pieces of the puzzle for my new workshop setup. Some more tooling for the mill and a new sandblaster will round it out. Looking forward to getting cracking on some prototypes!

Thanks to Tim and Nick at @frank_brothers guitars and @jeremynicks at Canadian School of Lutherie for their help moving in the compressor! Go check out their awesome guitars guys!

#compressor #madeincanada #cnc #instamachinist

Photo by Aaron Gough on April 22, 2015.
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Introducing the CNC photo booth! A completely frivolous and hilarious use of large industrial machinery!

I rigged this up because I had a party at the shop last night and wanted people to be able to interact with the machining center in a fun but non dangerous way!

Basically you take your photo on the webcam on my laptop, and then there's a program I wrote that converts the image to grayscale and produces a depth map from it. That is then converted to g-code and sent to the machine where it is 'printed' using a marker held in the spindle!

I only finished debugging the program *after* people started arriving so I was very pleased that it actually worked!

Everyone got to use the photo booth and have a picture done of them. It was a big hit!

On the serious side: writing the programs to make the toolpath and to communicate them to the machine have positioned me really well to use the machine for general purpose automaton in the future, a very exciting prospect!

#instamachinist #machining #machinist #machineshop #cnc #maker #bigassrobots


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Fuck yes! This thing is beautiful, thanks @orangeviseofficial!

This is a 16" single/double station CNC vise to go on the Fadal! 100% made in the USA, and really nicely made all round!

I said to Eric (the lovely bloke that makes these) that it's very cool to be able to call up the person who designed and made the thing you're buying and talk to them about it. Not a benefit that's to be underestimated I don't think!

#cnc #instamachinist #machinist #usamade

Photo by Aaron Gough on April 15, 2015.
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Got some #butchery practice last night at cooking class! Butchery is actually a lot of fun, and it's a quintessential knife skill so it seems like it's right up my alley!

Here I'm deboning and trimming a leg of lamb, preparing it to be stuffed and rolled into a roast. None of the people at my table wanted to tackle theirs so I got to do four of them! Pretty rough and slow at the start but this one was a lot better!

#knifeskills #cook #lamb #knifeclub


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Before and after of the #fadal machining center! Got it all reassembled yesterday including the new way covers and so on. I'm really pleased with how it looks and works so far!
The restoration to date has taken just over 120 hours of work. During that time my camera took 55,000+ photos which will shortly be made into a time lapse to go on YouTube!

Not much left to do at this point. Regrinding the spindle taper will be the next big thing, have to make an enclosure too, will soon actually be using this puppy to work on my prototypes!

#cnc #fadal #instamachinist #beforeandafter

Photo by Aaron Gough on April 06, 2015.
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The machine is fully greased up and alive! Very cool to finally see it making real movements! Vise is on the way from @orangeviseofficial and 5HP compressor is on the way from Canbuilt! So soon I'll be fully setup to start cutting!

Looking forward to getting started on the prototypes of the new Resolute!

#cnc #instamachinist #knifeclub #customknife #customknives #knifemaker


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Just finished bending and fitting all new copper grease lines for the Y axis in the machining center. Bit of a pain as it's fairly close quarters in this part of the machine, but I'm happy with how they came out!

The original grease lines all ruptured due to corrosion at the point where the aluminum hold down block can be seen. Now I just have to wait for a new header block and this axis will be back in commission!

Note the poor state of the paint in here, it's all been attacked by the synthetic coolant that was used on the machine.
Not long now before the whole machine is up and running!

#instamachinist #machining #cnc

Photo by Aaron Gough on March 22, 2015. Image may contain: 1 person.
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She lives to ride again! My Fadal VMC10 finally got the electrical hooked up to her this morning, and after some setup and a few confusing moments she's coming back to life!

Still plenty more painting and remedial maintenance to do, but progress is being made!

#instamachinist #cnc


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