Spring 2024 meetup in Calgary - date Saturday, April 20/2024. discussion Please RSVP Here to confirm and get your invitation and the location details. RSVP NOW so organizers can plan to get sufficient food etc. One week to go! More info and agenda
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Spring meet up in Ontario, April 6/2024. NEW LOCATION See Post #31 Discussion AND THE
NEW LOCATION
Prior to COVID I picked up a little 3018 CNC router off Facebook. Other than playing wit CNC I wanted to mill my own circuit boards. There is an active Facebook page for the 3018s. Yesterday someone asked if it could engrave steel. One of the responses was “not a chance” so........
They are OK. They can’t take big cuts in wood so small(tiny) bits are required. Therefore they are rather slow and small projects are the best. To cut out my circuit boards I do it in two passes with a 1mm bit and a feed rate of 350mm/min. Best part is that it can drill all those holes quite accurately. For circuit boards there’s a bit too much play for my liking. For engraving and wood carving they’re fine. Upgrading them can become a money pit though, you fix one weak point and then run into the next. I’m trying to avoid that.LOL
Thanks John, I may end up building one.
Looking really hard at the PrintNC.
I don’t need a big work area but I want high precision as I plan to cut wooden type.
Thanks John, I may end up building one.
Looking really hard at the PrintNC.
I don’t need a big work area but I want high precision as I plan to cut wooden type.
Yes, wooden type for printing presses.
We have a small press and I’m designing a large screw type press to print larger formats.
Wooden type is highly sought after and can be fiendishly expensive.
It’s typically carved out of a fine grained hardwood like cherry or maple.
This is 3D printed type I made as an experiment.
This place has the largest collection of wooden type in the world.
My partner teaches book history at university so does a segment on typesetting and binding.
We don't have any print samples at home though, they are all at her office.
If you send me a drawing for a character I could see how well mine does. I really need to try a carving with it but haven’t come up with anything worthwhile.
I like the old English as well as some of the borders / corners I have a machine that uses a film to transfer it to photo paper that I used for camera work.
Wow, 20 pt is pretty small when you try to mill it, I used a 0.75mm burr type endmill to do this. I think a better bit and cutting on the end grain might work. This is only 0.25mm deep.
Slightly off-topic but kind of related, these are some of my Dad’s treasures. He wasn’t a sentimental kind of guy and kept no letters or correspondence but did stash away his old things from “the business”, as he called it. Telling actually, for a man who went to business college specifically for that purpose and did nothing but for the rest of his working life. It was entirely who he was, I guess.
Anyway, we used to play with this stuff when we were growing up, especially the rubber stamps which would keep us occupied for hours (especially if we spilled the box of the small set). I think they’re from his first “businesses” in Grande Prairie and later Dawson so would be from the late 1940’s into the early ‘50’s.
The big set was the most popular and The Hand stamp one of our favourites. I thought they may have been all wood (hence my notion to look at them again today) but they do have a rubber layer that is the imprint part. A little hard by now but they still print about as well as they ever did if there’s a somewhat soft backing under the paper.
The small set required more patience but you can actually build words using the teeny rubber letters and stacking them into the special holders backwards and upside down, I think. Yup, and then we’d upset the box and the little rubber bits would go flying. Heck, even the plastic bag has got to be an heirloom by now!
I’m the keeper of them now along with a box of really cool old gold water transfer letters that you’d use to put your name on a glass door or something. I’m thinking these hail from the last “business” in Dawson mid-1960’s. I’m pretty sure he had ones like this on his office door. I’ve got a glass door to my house but can’t really think of what to put on it — maybe just “The Business” and leave it at that?
Thanks for indulging me. @David_R8 maybe this explains my continued history with letters and sign making, eh?
Oh wow Frank, my dad had a very similar set. And as a kid when I got to go out on the road with him (he built roads in AB) I could stamp to my heart’s content in the portable office that we dragged around behind one of the dump trucks.
Those are some really fond memories.
Wow, 20 pt is pretty small when you try to mill it, I used a 0.75mm burr type endmill to do this. I think a better bit and cutting on the end grain might work. This is only 0.25mm deep. View attachment 13807View attachment 13808
