[buro9]

This looks awesome.

For $1,200 you could set up as a company making little things for others, earn enough to pay for the machine and then benefit from it yourself.

What I would do with such a machine is to solve the problem of bike accessories and mounts. i.e. every light has a different mount, as do GPS devices, and cameras, and bag attachments. Yet you could manufacture some common clamp, and then adaptors for each thing. Perhaps standardise around something like the GoPro bracket for an even wider market (it would allow flashes and other accessories to be mounted using existing GoPro segments).

There's so many things you can do.

And they make a gun! Who cares about guns! It's all the other stuff that make this awesome.

[exDM69]

This isn't a general purpose CNC milling machine.

If you read the whole article, this is specifically designed to mill and drill the lower receivers of AR15, from a piece of aluminum stock called the "80 percent stock", which is a non-functional metal part that is only missing a few holes.

If you have grand ideas about bike accessories and other metal objects, you can buy a proper CNC mill which is a bit more expensive than this. Or pay for CNC machining service at your local machine shop. It's not super expensive.

[joshu]

http://Othermachine.co/

It is a tiny cnc mill. I have one and I love it. I mostly make wooden arty thinks, but I did successfully mill an aluminum car part for some friends.

[rev_bird]

I've been thinking about getting into milling (wood, or freaky candles) for a while now, but I can't tell if my lack of familiarity with CAD software is going to mean I stink at it forever. How hard was it to get into? Do you have special training from a trade or anything, or did you just pick this up as a hobby?

[joshu]

No training except for googling stuff and pestering their customer service folks.

I learned openscad from the tutorials. I use meshcam to generate tool paths. Mostly I use python to generate the source art and just cut that out.

[buro9]

I visited the site all excited only discover that very fact.

I'm also probably on some weird list now for visiting a site to see about home made guns.

[stan_rogers]

"A bit" being the operative phrase. Something like a Sherline with the CNC options wouldn't set you back much more than that (depending on how many axes you need, bed size and height, of course). Not pretty, not overly fast, and takes some manual setup, but it'll keep you well south of the $10K-ish you could otherwise pay for a slick turnkey.

[chromaton]

This machine is likely to have a very low machining speed due to weak motors and other motion components. You are unlikely to be able to out-compete a professional machine shop making small parts. So while this is nice for hobbyists, it is unlikely to pay for itself in a professional situation. If you want a machine to pay for itself and be more generally useful, you would be better off spending the money on a Chinese manual milling machine.

[discardorama]

However: consider the time taken to hunt around for a machine shop; the latency (when the machine shop can actually schedule you in); things like "business hours", etc. and suddenly this machine may become competitive with suitable automation.

[chromaton]

I had been through exactly that a number of times before starting a business where you can order custom parts online 24/7.

[Someone1234]

I want to do a similar project but for car dashboards.

Much like bike accessories we're always buying things like phone holders, fan holders, or CB radio handset holders. But these things never attach to the dashboard well because they depend on suction cups or clips to the vent grate (which aren't standard anyway).

All car dashboards should come with a 1/4-20 inch screw thread. Maybe two, one of the driver's side and a second for the front passenger. Then to accessorize your car, you just buy a simple cellphone clip which screws in.

The nice part about 1/4-20 is that it is already used for a ton of stuff (i.e. anything tripod compatible), so there are already accessories on the market for that screw size.

[jessaustin]

I like the idea (perhaps with some guidelines about what would or would not be safe to attach to one's dashboard), but be careful you don't rouse the metric enthusiasts with this 1/4-20 talk.

[imaginenore]

> every light has a different mount, as do GPS devices, and cameras, and bag attachments. Yet you could manufacture some common clamp, and then adaptors for each thing. Perhaps standardise around something like the GoPro bracket for an even wider market

You can't just sell them, you first have to license every patented clamp and mount. And I guarantee you, 99% of them are patented.