doxilia

My Feedback: (3)

Gents,

thanks for your comments and input.

FB, work continues. Patience will bring us all some rare jewels... but it's hard to contain oneself!

Viktor,

generally, I get the gist of what you're talking about. Not having seen a CNC mill first hand in operation it's hard to entirely conceive how the process works. However, you're the expert and it would strike me that you are the best judge to assess whether using your mill is viable from both an operational and cost standpoint. Modelers following this thread have understood the implications and the work involved by the various parties. Most have volunteered their time and labor which typically is the largest expense in any project, so with that in mind, you have to let us know whether your mill would be able to produce some of these select parts and if so, whether the cost (and your time) would be acceptable. It is clear that if NBU blocks for each different kit entails days of work and ends up costing in the order of 10's of dollars (or Euros [X(]), then it no longer makes sense to do so. Shipping also has to be accounted for.

The way I see it, each model should be treated separately assessing which parts are worth milling (or producing). If, say, there are 5 parts per kit that could be produced and there are 10 parties interested in a kit (for a starters...), we're looking at 50 balsa blocks that need to be produced and shipped. You can see very quickly where this is going. In a nutshell, you kind of get into the milling business. That is something that, to me, has to be thought about carefully. If one is not setup for "serializing" the work, it can be a problem.

I'll leave that hanging for some further thought and we can continue that correspondence via email. (I'll reply to your email soon).

DN,

I think you are onto something. As a lay modeler, if I were to want to re-produce some of these block parts myself, I'd probably think of a band saw first followed by router of sorts (basically a Dremel tool). So, I'd think that for the purposes of automation, it would also be conceivable to have a band (or circular) saw on three axes capable of producing the part by rotating around the block as needed. For our purposes that is evidently not possible, but rather than have the saw move around the part, the part could be moved around the saw. This evidently leads to jigs and manual work.

I think the questions really are, 1) is there a facility or party with CNC routing or band sawing capabilities that could produce these parts in small quantities (not industrial) at reasonable cost? If yes, then no need to address the next question, if no, then 2) would we be willing to produce these parts ourselves either from rectangular blocks provided in the kit or by cutting the parts from balsa we supply.

My preference is for the first option but since this is a grass roots project, some realities may set (I'm not convinced yet) in and it may be that it won't be viable to re-produce reasonably complete kits. Whatever the case, the outcome is probably not much of a deterrent for us since we're all avid builders. We scratch build, we build from short kits and, when we can, we build MK kits... If we need to produce some specific parts for our build, then we do so and have fun doing it.

In any event, I think that you are right in that it might be easier to band saw some of these parts rather than mill them whether done in series or as one offs.

I'll leave that post there with those thoughts.

David.