Keep up to date with the latest changes here at A Quick CNC. This is also where we will post new developments and new machines!
#339
I was told by a backer today that our updates were too far and few between... and as a result that meant we weren't doing any work. That couldn't have been farther from the truth. While we wanted to give updates every day a lot of what is going on is quite boring and tedious work. It’s not the cool stuff about making these CNCs happen, but its stuff that has to happen for the machines to be finished. We didn't want to flood your email with the details of soldering 700 more wire connections over the course of 12 hours, nor the hours of putting nuts and bolts into baggies for the assembly of 43+ machines. So here is one big update from the last week instead!

Firstly as was mentioned we had to solder another 700 wire connections. The first set we did the week prior was the female parts and these parts are the male counterparts. It took a good 12+ hours to get done spaced out over a weekend. This is only half way there! We need to wait for the motors and electronics to finish with the other half. Another 20+ hours we suspect to finish with the wire bundles.

Secondly, lots of parts have been showing up. Another not so fun job that needed to be done was with the repackaging of parts. Here thousands upon thousands of nuts, washers, bolts… etc. are being transferred from bulk packaging into the amounts required for each machine. In addition many other parts are arriving such as this huge box of parallel cables for the electronics.

Unfortunately some items that are arriving are being damaged during shipping. That is one thing that is going to cause some slowdowns with this process. We did purchase extras in case of damages and breakages, but some items will require replacement. Here is a shipment of threaded rod we received today that was 25% damaged. It’s only a small part of the nearly quarter mile of threaded rod that is required for this project. (Another boring task coming up will be cutting the entire threaded rod to length! There are hundreds of threaded rods required in the structure of the machines.)

Now for something cool.

Our (hopefully) final mold for the Bosch Router is almost done. It still needs a few modifications before we start using it, but we are very satisfied with the test piece. It is very strong, and we will be using even stronger plastic for the final production piece. Once the mold is completed, we will take all four molds and begin the task of making the plastic components. Each component will take roughly 3 hours each and there are nearly 50 of them. It will probably take about 2 weeks to have all of them finished. Once they are completed we will start cutting the wood pieces and finishing the electronics.

Hope everyone enjoys this update, it may not be all the cool stuff with building CNC routers but it’s all necessary. There is a lot going on… We’re spending at least 50 hours a week (if not more) working on these machines. So I hope no one feels like no progress is being made.

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