I’ve found myself infected with a desire to have a machine shop. I don’t exactly know what I’d use it for, but there’s something so cool about making your own stuff.
I’ve been making things for… I probably shouldn’t have calculated it, but it turns out to be 23 years now. They’ve all been digital. Somehow it never occurred to me that you can just make things yourself rather than buy it from Amazon. It sounds stupid to write it out like that, but it’s an easy thing to overlook, because you can go your whole life without thinking about it.
There’s also no limit to the stuff you can cobble together. Here’s someone whose channel averages about 30 views per video, who made a vacuum pump out of a refrigerator compressor. https://youtu.be/4Zg0EXvyD-4?si=f6oB8ScuhDd64T6n (His channel also has hundreds of videos with dozens of projects, including making his own friggin’ laser CNC machine from scratch via arduino and time. https://youtu.be/0z-zXQ2INp4?si=Y0Ao6dwr1YpQVqU7 I have no idea how no one has noticed him yet.)
All of this culminated into an intersection of everything I’ve been interested in recently: 3D resin-printed molds for plastic injection molding. https://youtu.be/wMRSPXt48CI?si=5IeQnSi89byrr0Il You can make practically anything you can think of, and they don’t feel cheap. Not to punch down on normal 3D printers; some people love them, but a larger contingent dismiss most of what they can make as cheap toys. They’re not wrong.
It’s interesting tracing a line from the Stone Age tools to these. The people back then were smart and industrious. If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
If you really want to start from the beginning, get “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap” by David Gingery.
Quoting the description from Amazon (link below)…
“[It] is a progressive series of seven projects. Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry, you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it is not long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts.”
That’s what Harbor Freight is great for if you’re in the States. They have little milling machines and lots of cheap tools that work well for one-off stuff, at least.
Was lucky to take an engineering machining class in college and got to use a lathe and mill, am more of a welder now. The definition of a “tool” is pretty loose but lots of small things can be made with just a cheap stick welder and grinder.
If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
That confused me because in Spanish, the same word is used for a potter's wheel. Anyway that would be more recent too. But I think that there's a long prehistoric period, between stone tools and stone buildings, that we know very little because they used wood, more than anything else.
I have a lot of respect for our far ancestors thanks to this guy:
He made some awesome documentaries in the 70's showing stone age tribes in the Amazonia and their incredible techniques to make a blowgun, arrows or a hut.
It seems there's much interest here for CNC, did you see this post?
You start by acquiring of basic hand operated ones, then there is a whole set of tools for construction that you can probably use for garden furniture carpentry, then come the tools that you can use to create furniture proper.
I believe material wise it is a similar journey. From soft construction wood to hardwoods, that require different tools and techniques...
Metal processing is a challenge of it's own. One set of tolling while you do aluminium grade of metals and then tooling becomes more or less cost prohibitive.
Consider the workshop space. It is a lot of tools for this journey...
It is sort of same as software development. You do spend a lot of time to prepare infrastructure to craft repeatable parts that will stick together and align on a certain angle, etc.
The feeling when it works is magical. Fighting your tool to get things done (it is time for upgrade :)) is dreadful...
I remember an old Amateur Scientist article from Scientific American way back which showed how to build a gas liquifier with a refrigerator compressor. I tried to build a couple of the AS projects, but my fab skills as a kid were sorely lacking.
I’m on the same boat, currently working on making my own multi tools. I reckon it can be a rabbit hole as I see all that’s involved in knife making and blacksmithing.
I think there's really a modern disconnect for a lot of people (myself included, a lot of the time) between needing/wanting "a thing" and the idea that you don't always need to buy that thing as a product from someone else. That creating, modifying, or even repairing something yourself to serve whatever purpose is really not that far out of an idea. My partner and I have been infected by the same desire and have been starting to acquire various tools and machines over the years, and even now I find myself still defaulting to searching for something on amazon when I run into a problem/"a thing" that I want without even considering if I could DIY it myself. Obviously its not always better or even cheaper to DIY something, especially considering tool and material accessibility and cost, but I think at large a lot of folks don't even consider it an option. It is one of those things that when you first realize you don't _have_ to buy the thing off of amazon, it feels incredibly obvious and that you should've known that from the start, but I really thing it is a somewhat uncommon idea nowadays. (There's probably a conversation you could have about the millions of reasons why that's the case re: modern consumerism, less emphasis on "blue collar" skills and the general perspective that they're "lesser" skills/pathways than their "white collar" counterparts, etc. But that's a whole nother topic :) )
I do think there's some resurgence here with a lot of the modern "maker" movement, which is awesome! But at least in the content bubble I live in, it seems there's still _a bit_ of a disconnect between the newer, more digital "3D Printing, Code, Electronics etc." spaces and the more analog "Wood, Metal, Paint, Clay, etc." spaces. (I think this gap is slowly closing, though!)
Re: Injection molding, you might be interested in a few videos from Evan Monsma's youtube channel [1] where he makes an incredibly cheap injection molding machine out of a drill press[2], and explores super inexpensive mold making materials like steel epoxy putty[3] (also highly recommend checking his channel out in general, it's recently been becoming one of my favorite smaller channels!)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/EvanMonsma
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovD-FPOVlo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwbxNOAg3Pc
This fellow inherited his grandfather’s machine shop https://youtu.be/hearLttbrLo?si=r2CHxdepmhQ71xJq and used it to make… a pen. https://youtu.be/j27RKTHMLkA?si=f5OPN7ZJ10EBSZa4 And it’s an addiction I didn’t know I had.
The gateway drug that led to all of this was a video about a $200 CNC mill https://youtu.be/K9pjduKSsKs?si=mOJGCF9X6_s7d-J9 which led to a tour of his machine shop https://youtu.be/bHnfvtYHn7k?si=w65ZPfYm_5xpdkcD and a video about making a library. For his apartment. With a ladder that rolls along the shelves. https://youtu.be/DPRQaPVuRxU?si=uyR5xMDWgrYzHqlp
I’ve been making things for… I probably shouldn’t have calculated it, but it turns out to be 23 years now. They’ve all been digital. Somehow it never occurred to me that you can just make things yourself rather than buy it from Amazon. It sounds stupid to write it out like that, but it’s an easy thing to overlook, because you can go your whole life without thinking about it.
There’s also no limit to the stuff you can cobble together. Here’s someone whose channel averages about 30 views per video, who made a vacuum pump out of a refrigerator compressor. https://youtu.be/4Zg0EXvyD-4?si=f6oB8ScuhDd64T6n (His channel also has hundreds of videos with dozens of projects, including making his own friggin’ laser CNC machine from scratch via arduino and time. https://youtu.be/0z-zXQ2INp4?si=Y0Ao6dwr1YpQVqU7 I have no idea how no one has noticed him yet.)
All of this culminated into an intersection of everything I’ve been interested in recently: 3D resin-printed molds for plastic injection molding. https://youtu.be/wMRSPXt48CI?si=5IeQnSi89byrr0Il You can make practically anything you can think of, and they don’t feel cheap. Not to punch down on normal 3D printers; some people love them, but a larger contingent dismiss most of what they can make as cheap toys. They’re not wrong.
It’s interesting tracing a line from the Stone Age tools to these. The people back then were smart and industrious. If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.