There was a stretch of time I was looking at videos of budget gaming PC builds and they'd be like "How to build a gaming PC for $150" and a lot of them went like "Buy a used Optiplex for $120, max out its RAM for $30, then use this GTX 2080 I got from nvidia for free because I have two billion subscribers."
Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.
Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?
Reddit: Well, I'm still tuning it for all my filaments. I've been through about 40kg, and I've got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.
Building a 3d printer is really its own hobby. You don't build a 3d printer because you want to print stuff, you build one because you want something to tinker with
Yeah those communities are wild. Before I bought my own printer I thought 3D printing is mostly fixing your printer and buying better parts and bed leveling and tuning etc.
Wasn't looking forward to it so I bought an off-the-shelf printer with minimal assembly from a "boring" Chinese brand - couldn't be happier with it, it just prints without any hassle and I have no urge to switch firmwares or tinker with the printer itself instead of with the printed stuff. To each their own I guess.
(Still plugged in a raspberry pi for octoprint and did some initial calibration for the filament of course ...)
It would be very very impressive if your CNC machine can produce and assemble electric motors, wiring and circuit boards from raw materials. But then it would not be a CNC machine anymore.
These machines are absolutely under a million dollars. You can even buy used ones right now for pennies on the dollar because a shitload of American metal shops just went out of business.
How much do you suppose it costs to move and set up one of these babies in a new location? I bet the sellers would be happy to have a buyer just get it out of their building.
This isn't even close to a million dollar machine. Those are all at least 6 axis mill turns with full enclosures and insane software packages in the control.
You see, there is this unwritten agreement between the creator and the viewer that they like stuff explained to them, but they don't actually replicate anything shown in the video. At best, they half-arsedly order some materials and then never get to it.
Some of us watch those videos to actually do stuff. I built a FPV racing drone from parts off BangGood with zero experience thanks to those YouTube DIY videos.
man you're following the wrong channels then, there's a good chance any food videos i watch will at least give me ideas for how to improve my own cooking
Just ran into this like a week ago with a wood working video. "How to flatten a board without a planer!". The whole premise was that planers are expensive, so here a little trick for hobbyist........ The next scene was them using a router table jig that's like 5x more expensive then any planer.
So have you found a solution for that? I've also run into the exact problem when i tried to flatten a board and all i can do after getting disappointed is using hand planner/electric hand planner 🤣
A possible solution in a pinch is to get an already flat surface, ideally larger than your board. Cover it in something that will transfer (ink, paint, toner etc). Rub the face of the board you want to flatten across your flat surface**. The** transfer substance will pass onto the high spot in your board. Scrape, chissle or sand the high spots down slightly.
Repeat this until most of your board is marked by the transfer substance. Your board will be mostly flat (or at least as flat as the reference surface).
This technique is used in metal work, but it's labour intensive. For woodwork to achieve sufficient flatness planes are quicker and produce a better surface finish. But if you don't have any large ones, this method might work if your desperate and don't want to buy new tools.
For a less accurate flatness. Place the board on the flat surface and push in the board to fell the points in contact with the flat surface. Then take those parts down.
The solution I have found is a sander and realizing you will never be perfect.
Look for the imperfections in the garbage they sell at the store. The bottom of your kitchen table. The inside of your kitchen cabinets. Those are the mistakes they're trying to hide.
There's a pretty easy solution if you have a decent plunging router with a good flattening bit head.
I set up two 2x6" along the length of my board I want to flatten, and then made a jig box for my router. The jig box is able to slide back and forth while resting across the 2x6, using the depth guide to keep the cuts at a level depth as you do your pass overs.
There are some professional woodshops or wood suppliers that will run wood through a planer or drum sander for a fee. I have seen $50-100 for a table top size slab, double that if it has resin. So call around.
That machine costs well over $381k. We had a much smaller 3 axis lathe installed in the machine shop I worked in during my early 20's and it was $3M. That was 25 years ago, so it probably costs infinity dollars now, given recent inflation. Hell, you probably can't even buy them now, just lease them on a subscription for eleventy bajillion dollars per year.
Or, maybe you can still buy it. It still runs! Maybe it only costs $100,000 now!
...but there's very specific high-impact parts that are no longer made and the since-abandoned software only works on Win95 with a proper license and some kind of bizarrely proprietary serial port connection...
I'm the weirdo that has a full cnc machine shop at home. I was a cnc machinist for 20 years, though. Brain fog from covid killed my ability to do it, though. I do miss it, because that is something I truly love doing.
The wacky thing about Adam Savage's shop is that he doesn't have a multimillion dollar CNC machine, but he has every single ordinary tool made by man. The dude has a run of the mill engine lathe and 4,000 pounds of jigs and tooling for it, plus more hardware than the average Fastenal.
Adam savage is a godsend, his build tend to use the tool that's either inexpensive or it can be replicated with another tools. His philosophy is always "hiding the crime" so the imperfections is always either out of view or is part of the charm. Perfect role model for a maker just starting out.
Adam just got a 3D printer, it took him until late last year to get one.
Granted his passion is the process to make things and a 3D printer just skips all of that to make something inferior in 1:100th the time and effort, but you would think a gadget lover like him would have had one for years. I can't wait to see what he does with it.
Welder isn't too crazy of a tool. It's usually more like, get your 3d printer AND your welder AND your CNC AND your drill press AND your table saw plus a million other hyper specific gadgets.
I remember when it had the opposite problem. "Today, we're going to make a working fusion reactor out of an old HP laptop I found in my garage", and everything is specific to that particular HP laptop.
Heh, I remember I had stopped following Primitive technology for a while because he stopped uploading videos. Then one day I decided to check on the channel and bloody hell the guy was refining iron in a mud hut with a clay blast furnace and forging an iron knife/arrow head...
It's honestly more of an arrogance thing. I have a nice drill, screws and different types of cold glue. I don't want my projects to be anything like the crap I see in 5 Minute Crafts, so I avoid the tool. I know, it makes no sense, but so far I have never really needed a glue gun.
I really appreciate it when they give the quicker option for using equipment, or a slower option if you don't have like a hacksaw or drill press. I think DiyPerks does that?
Or I just watch the YouTube channel 'Primitive Technology' .... of some young guy that goes into a jungle with nothing and starts building things with his bare hands.
I know it's a set up situation and made for entertainment but I'm indigenous Canadian and my dad was a hunter trapper who was born in the wilderness in northern Ontario. In his prime in his 20s, I have lots of relatives who told me that dad would leave the community with a little pack, a knife and an axe in the autumn and come back after Christmas with a supply of furs to sell. Then head off and come back two or three times in the winter to deliver more furs. Then come back in the spring to live in town before going out again in the fall.