Archives

I better start off with a warning. If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m kind of a nut about patterns. Long before I owned a CNC, I made hundreds of them. As a furniture maker, I [...]

As the Chinese curse goes, “may you live in interesting times.” Sometimes, “interesting times” is actually a good thing. In the case of CNCs, there are a lot of new ideas, [...]

In earlier posts in this series, I explained how you can take simple computer drawings and make paper patterns. In my last post, I revealed the process I used for years for making MDF patterns. [...]

In the first post of this series, I explained the process that I use to make paper patterns for parts. Simply put, output your design to your printer, use the tiling feature to divide larger [...]

It always starts with a design Digital woodworking uses digitally controlled tools in your workshop as an addition to hybrid and handtools. Most often this means owning and operating a CNC and [...]

The very idea of digital woodworking is something new and strange to a lot of woodworkers, so it’s only natural there are a lot of questions. For many, the big question is “where do I start?” The [...]

A Desktop size CNC at an Entry Level Price One of the questions I’m most often asked is “would you do a review of an affordable CNC?”  Up to now, there’ve been few choices for woodworkers [...]

My last several posts have been about how the BARN workbench vise chops were designed. In this post, I’ll show you how the CNC was programmed for machining with CAM software. I use RhinoCAM [...]

In my last few posts, I showed how two different vise chops designs were created for the BARN workbenches. One technique was based on an easy to use 3D CAD tool: extrusion. Armed with a squiggly [...]

In my last post, I used Rhino3D CAD software to create a 3D ripple for one of the BARN Workbench vise chops. 3D drawing tools were used to take a simple squiggly line and revolve it around a [...]

In earlier posts, I used CAD software to create the 2D design for the BARN Workbench vise chop and the I built a pin registration board for two-sided machining on my CNC. Rather than a square and [...]

In my previous post about making the BARN workbench vise chop, I shared the basic CAD design work for the project. In Rhino3D, I created the curved 2D design – the chop and a simple box [...]