PrintNC Project Part 3.1 - Steel prep and first holes drilled! 

For those that have no clue what @ernest jr sanford is talking about, it's a method of removing mill scale from steel. :)

@@f15sim Yeah!!! What he said. ;)

The transfer punch is so soft, it's hard to see the mark, let alone get a drill bit to catch in the divot it makes. That's why I chase them with a hardened punch. I'm checking the holes with the assembly tool each time and so far I've only had one be a little bit off, and I understand why that happened, so it's unlikely to happen again. The plan going forward is to do a video that covers one or two steps at a time and I can hopefully get those out more frequently. I've shown the hole marking & drilling tasks, so I won't need to get footage of those tasks again. One of the tasks that's going to take a while to nail down is planning the layout for the electrical enclosure. The back is going to be 3mm 6061-T6 plate, and I know the general shape I want, but the rest of it is up in the air. I also need to design something to contain the workstation for the machine that will have all the user interface elements built into it. Keyboard, display, e-stop, cycle start & stop buttons, etc. At some point I'm going to hit a wall because of the cost of materials - it's $80 USD for a crap sheet of 3/4" 4x8 plywood right now and I need four or five of those to complete the enclosure and workstation builds. I just spent $200 on that TASCO recorder and at the rate the channel rakes in the money, it'll have paid for itself in 12-16 years. ;)

@@f15sim feel your pain re plywood prices, it is just as bad here too. Proper transfer punches are hardened btw. You really need a cnc machine to build a cnc machine.

@@wv838 Had I not wanted to make a video series out of the build, i would have used my ShopBot to spot-drill most if not all the holes. However, I can't start a build video with, "First, spend $18,000.00 on a 4x8 CNC router." Most folks are going to get transfer punches that will get the job done and stop there. A machine shop can afford the tool cost because of the time savings. Us professional tryhards, not so much. ;)

@@f15sim I was more pointing out some irony, that you need the tool you are building, to build the tool you are building:)

@@wv838 Literal Gene is Literal. ;)

All machines require a blood sacrifice...or two. ;)