| Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645605 This was a resource which was mentioned on the Shapeoko wiki --- while it's off-line, it's still on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20211127090321/https://wiki.shap... Since then, some of those pages have been made available on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/hobbycnc/wiki/index https://old.reddit.com/r/shapeoko/wiki (ob. discl., I work for Carbide 3D) And there have been a number of other developments - FreeCAD has hugely improved since that was written. - Solvespace as greatly improved, adding some basic CAM functionality - Blender has had the Solvespace sketcher ported to it as https://www.cadsketcher.com/ and BlenderCAM has gotten quite a bit more workable - Dune3D was created and is remarkably capable: https://dune3d.org/ Also a fair number of forums discussing CNC were gathered at: https://forum.makerforums.info/ |
3D printing with PLA has improved in the intervening decade. You can usually get a good print on good modern printers. The first generation of those things had poor extruders, and filament formulation has reportedly improved. There's complicated heat transfer going on in those things. You're welding a hot thing to a cold thing, which is inherently troublesome. I'm told that works better now.
Machining resin molds is straightforward, because you start with a block of something and machine only its top. So there's no work-holding problem. Trying to figure out how to clamp something that needs to be machined on several sides is usually hard.
Not sure what's going on in tiny mills today. I've used Tormachs, the whole range of Shopbots, and some strange one-off machines that TechShop somehow obtained. (Never did use the beautiful little Pocket 5-axis machine. TheShop had one just before they went bankrupt.)