I was watching some videos on milling CF with a cheap desktop router and just wondered if anyone on here runs one.  If so which one?  What are the pros and cons.

The videos i've been watching seem to concentrate on the Vevor 3018, basically because it is cheap and readily available from Walmart.  It seems it's possible to mill CF out of the box with it.

So i'm not considering getting one right now as I don't have anywhere near the infrastructure required to use one, but I do find it an interesting topic.  I also want to learn to make my own frames, so somewhere down the line I probably will get one.

Following with interest, looked into it briefly last summer. Give me some time to see if I bookmarked anything that might help.

fwiw not directly related but he has some really cool content about a bunch of things:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Clough42/videos

(31-Jan-2024, 06:01 PM)skywanderer Wrote: fwiw not directly related but he has some really cool content about a bunch of things:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Clough42/videos

I'm quite an amateur in comparison to him.  I think the most specialised thing I have in my arsenal is a mig welder.  But I would love a room in a house dedicated to 3D Printing, milling and prototyping in general.  Would love a plasma cutter, but not in an actual house (someone I know nearly died using one in a garage from fume exposure).  Also a spray painting setup would be cool that allowed safe use of 2 Pack (this is unlikely to ever happen for me at least in terms of a proper spray painting booth, although I did wonder if you could build a mini version using a sealed glove box and pumping the fumes through a water bath and activated charcoal filters).

Once upon a time some years back I laid my hands on a really old plotter, from around the 1980s, an Oki or Brother flat bed style pen plotter.  With a friend we tried to mount a stick welder to the plotter arm with limited success as more of a science experiment.  It did kind of work, but this was at a time when doing such things would probably have been classified as unusual.  Nowadays you could do something like that and no one would bat an eyelid.  But back then, lol.  It caught fire.  Was a complete beast of a plotter, took A2 sized paper sheets and was like 2m long.  It worked for a while, but welding requires a certain amount of pressure and a certain amount of speed and we could never get the thing to do either of those two things particularly well.  As a milling machine it would have probably worked well.  As a plotter it did work well.

Guess I am even more amateur coz I've never welded before. Couldn't find bookmarks, I'll check for notes next...

OT sorry but... remembered this thread when I saw this & figured you wouldn't be too offended:



...that cat get skinned so many ways... but fun content w\This Old Tony.