Question of the week is…What got you into CNC’s and 3d printing?
For me, it was @Jonathjon. He introduced me to the world, all it can do and I am really enjoying it!
Question of the week is…What got you into CNC’s and 3d printing?
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I knew of 3D printers in the early 2000s, and had an interest- started playing with repraps around 2011.
There was a manufacturer of 3D printers up the road from me in Loveland Colorado, using a derivative of the Mendel-90 design (Lulzbot AO-100). Very early and relatively primitive (looking back now), but advanced then. Used Marlin firmware with Arduino Mega / RAMPS and a graphical LCD.
I remember the hotend being DIY capable, using a ceramic wire-wound power resistor as the heating element. It also was fiddly and the whole extuder was prone to jamming or cloggig the hobbed bolt, and countless other problems.
A few years later, I came across a local makerspace that was in the process of growing rapidly up to the near 800 member level it maintains today. When I became a coummunity member there was a print farm of AO-100s that had been donated by Lulzbot to makerspaces when they upgraded their factory build farm from AO-100s to the then new TAZ printer.
If I recall correctly, there were 8 of these AO-100s in the makerspace build farm. As a community member and eventual shop captain, I rebuilt these printers countless times and was pretty sick of it when we bought a FlashForge creator pro dual. That just worked. We let members buy up the AO-100s for something like $25.
On the CNC side, I’d worked with some really high end machinists in the satellite manufacturing facility where I worked, and was more than a little intimidated by the machine (ranged from 50s era to 2000s era) but much more so by the machinsts- they were the real secret to the incredible machining capabilities used in high-end spacecraft and optical instrument manufacturing.
I bought myself a Sherline mini mill and got it working, but never really grokked the fees/speeds and couldn’t really get good results. It wasn’t pressing, so I sold it to a fellow that made miniature steam engines in brass. He loved it. I took a bath - it was a $2500 machine and I think I sold it for $500.
Was watching with interest when the MPCNC came out. I was intrigued, but very skeptical. A 3D printed cnc router? Lunacy! 
Lurked here for a long while before building my own.
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My first school was a carpentry school and we used CNC routers there. In my second year, a company asked students who knew how to use CNC machines, so I got a real job. After that, I switched to another company that needed a CNC machinist for metal. I’ve been fascinated by CNC controlled machines since the first time I use them (~2015). And I was interested in building my own from scratch too. Much later, I got interested in 3D printing and talked to a coworker who was also interested in it. One day, he carried an old Anet A6 to work (10km by bike) for me and said keep it for free.
Edit: I was designing my own CNC and I had calculated the price for it and it was so expencive… happily I did find V1e
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where I work, we sell Cutting Tools to Industries. I got a 3d printer, and somehow found v1 engineering, then made a mpcnc, and well, here I am, you unlucky peeps, bahahahaha
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I had a student whose dad had a fully equipped shop. The one thing he didn’t have was a CNC. And I had always wanted a 3D printer. Plus, I like woodworking and computers. 
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I started because my better half wanted to cut and sell cursive names as part of her online laser business. She bought me a Maslow. We couldn’t make money in that space with it and during covid with not much else to do i totally customized it (with a wii remote as a wireless pendant for example), rewrote the manual for it, and then found the mpcnc. I was sure it would cut faster and allow the name cutting opportunity… but I went another direction with it and still have the maslow for large items and I almost bought the m4. It is currently folded up against the garage ceiling. The mpcnc has been resized, then renewed, and now upgraded to a smaller lowrider 4. The v1 adventure for me was being part of a couple beta tests and hanging out last year at rmrrf. My neighbor has been helping me try to be a decent 3d printer for several years, but only after upgrading from the v4 to the v5 this last fall to print lowrider parts did I finally come to grips with it and most of the subtleties of it make sense now. Many years and much repetition…
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When I went back to university for my Masters in 2008/2009 we started using either a neighbouring university’s Tiertime Up Plus or a different department’s Stratasys to print bobbins for electromagnetic components.
I campaigned for our department to get one of the Tiertime ones which ended up being me ordering it direct from China on my personal CC then getting reimbursed, which was a pretty big deal at the time and seemed remarkably scary. When we went out as a startup we pretty much stole it to keep making bobbins and alignment parts for electromagnetics and other electronics.
That printer went back eventually and we replaced it with another one that was the slightly newer version. Then I bought a Mendel90 kit and assembled that for my personal use. That’s what all my MPCNC parts were printed on.
Since then we’ve had another couple of iterations of 3D printers as needed, added laser cutters and PCB milling etc. but it has always been driven primarily by work needs first with personal projects being a way to push the boundaries of what we can do with the machines.
For me, 3D printing is still the primary method of making stuff with CNC laser being the 2nd method.
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I’ve dabbled in woodworking for awhile. My dad was always doing woodworking projects growing up (and still does) and I’m sure that spawned some of that. I did some useful things but coming up with ideas was always a struggle.
Early on in the pandemic, I got my first 3d printer, an Ender 3 Pro. At the time, I was looking for something to occupy my time/mind during that craziness. I had been interested in 3d printers before but in my mind, they crossed a threshold of price/performance that made them seem viable to me. I was mostly interested in making functional items, so that got me into learning Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD.
I knew about CNCs but I didn’t realize they had reached that price/performance threshold where having one as a hobbyist was a real possibility. So, I considered buying one of those 3018s or similar, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Like with 3d printing, I’m still more likely to make functional, useful things than decorations (although that’s fun too). Then I stumbled on V1 and lurked on the forum for a couple months. The Lowrider’s ability to cut sheet goods was quite appealing. Something of that size could make useful things. The forum lurking gave me the confidence that this was a project I could take on so late 2023 I pulled the trigger. It’s still wild to me that I have a CNC out in my garage.
Now I have a bunch of project ideas and have learned a ton of stuff that all builds on each other into learning and doing things I’d have never thought I could just a year or so ago.
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I love tinkering.
Many years ago, I got sucked into a little site called lumenlab.com (now gone) the idea was building DIY video projectors. The basic kit was basically a set of overhead projector lenses, which you used with a 15" monitor. As it happens, I know a thing or two about optics, and ended up being a moderator.
One of the guys there was a fellow named Joe, and around about 2006, he released a design for a DIY CNC. This basically required you to have some sort of bootstrap CNC, or to buy the cut MDF and HDPE parts, which didn’t work out for me at the time, but it kind of put the bug in my ear, so to speak.
Several years later, after some drama involving Chinese manufacturers and their take on IP (some of us got together and developed the optics for a better lens. Lumenlab got them made in China, and weeks later, they were available all.over the Internet for half the price that they were gettjng them for. The business never recovered.)
Anyway, some time after that, 3D printing came into its own, at least enough that a guy could buy a kit. I think I.paid $600 for a really crappy (but at least functional) I3 clone. My thought was that I could make templates to make one of Joe’s CNC machines. (I couldn’t, the printer was just too crappy.) I could make a few things, but like many people, most kf what I 3D printed was new parts for my 3D printer.
A few iterations later, I had a printer that could print things that could actually fit together, and I started looking at CNC again. Joe had gone commercial, and the build price looked like more than I wanted to swing for a hobby machine, but I kept looking around.
Then I found this mention of a 3D printed (mostly) CNC machine. Surprisingly, not on the cnczone forums, or on CNC sites, but on Reprap’s forum, I think. I looked, bought parts for a Primo, and probably spend way more in the V1 shop than I would have spent on a Joe’s CNC, but I also have more stuff than I would have, and Ive had a lot of fun, too.
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My coworkers all started building 3d printers, so I got one. I was the first in the building with a CNC, though.
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My dad sent me a link to BuildYourOwnCNC.com and I thought it would be cool to machine lithophanes of some of my photography for gifts. Built the first one and have now been through 6 CNC routers and on my 6th 3d printer.
The 3d printers started when I found the MPCNC. Bought an Ender3 to print it with.
I have yet to actually carve a lithophane but have printed them!
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My mechanical and electrical engineer cousins were always talking about building CNC machines and I thought that was cool. I discovered rainfall projects YouTube channel by looking for diy drum to meat smoker videos and subsequently watched this one.
https://youtu.be/ZzrIEtuAvNo?si=YKMAhnZ2lM2hM5Is
The moment at around 6:45 really sold me and so I started googling best cheap CNC machines which put me onto V1E. The docs and super awesome forum sealed the deal. Then it only made sense to buy a 3d printer to save on the printed parts lol. I went to University of Louisville and they were doing a lot of stuff with medical 3d printing while I was there so that started some interest in 3d printing as well. It’s been a fun journey since then.
(Plus the chemical engineer that is me built a CNC machine and my cousins still haven’t; big plus)
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It finally got enough traction on the ADHD roundabout. Kind of like the miniatures I have, sitting in my “hobby room”, that I haven’t touched in a couple of years, and all need painting (and will likely never see the roll of a die), or the die molding and casting materials I bought about two years ago (including some custom masters), that I haven’t gotten to since I ordered it all. Or the microcontroller stuff I’m working on now that will likely not get completed, and the RPi cluster that needs to be reformatted and rebuilt. And… And… And…
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I bought a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in about 2015. I shared the $350 purchase with my dad. It stayed at my house for a while, but he has it now.
I was looking for something to print and Ryan had just finished his boca bearings contest. I wasn’t sure if I could print it. I remember the first question I asked Ryan was, “which part is the hardesy? I want to see if I can print that before printing the small stuff”. The core was multiple parts back then. But that was still the most complex part. It printed perfectly and my pink and gray MPCNC was born. I made it too big but it still cut a few projects just fine. The rest is history.
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