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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

A CNC router is on my list of tools to figure out and own. Routing aluminium, wood, and things like HDPE and being able to make moulds for silicones and resin? Yes please. 3D printing on the other hand never appealed to me.

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I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced.

Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.

Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.

I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.

But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.

The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.

On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.

Start with one of the cheap kits on Amazon. A good chunk of the learning curve is software/design/workflows. On the machine side, learning how to properly secure your work pieces, and find the right bits, speeds, and feeds is another art. You can do all of that on a ~$300 3018 CNC kit. Your work output is limited in size, and precision, but that doesn't matter as much when you're just trying to get the hang of things.

I have both, and a manual lathe and mill, and a laser cutter. 95% of everything I do is with the 3D printers. There is no indexing, no work holding, no dealing with shavings or smoke or dust or cutting oil that gets everywhere, no accidentally breaking your last end mill, no screwing up the only one of the thing you're cutting into, no cutting down stock so it fits in your machine, etc. You just press print. Setting up another machine is a right hassle by comparison.

3D printing and plastic parts isn't good for everything, but it is good enough (and easier) for a lot of things.

Yeah same. I’ve done a lot of CNCing but 3D printing isn’t appealing because I don’t care much for making plastic parts. When metal 3D printing becomes hobby tier I’ll be all over it.

Today 3D printing makes a lot of thing possible. Now that multi-toolhead printers are coming, some already available, it's possible to make composite parts. Like hard frame in soft wrapper, conductive lines (resistance still high), etc. I'm still learning, but it's exiting.

As for CNC, some cheap tabletop are available. FreeCAD is useful for design and g-code generation. The problem with cheap they are imprecise and shaky. I'm thinking about using 3d printed frame with metal everything else. Should be light enough to lift with one hand. For precision it'll need calibration from time to time as plastic moves. The goal is to have 3 axis mini CNC mill able to cut soft metals with precision better than 0.1mm.

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