Originally Posted by
[email protected]
Hi all,
For my first required post, I guess I will give some history about how I got here, and ask for suggestions on where to go from here. At the present time I am basically an artist sculptor/mold maker and before I started the process described below, I thought my most immediate interest was in making award medallions (like 2-3 inch coins with letters and bas relief artwork) for our local dog club tournaments. Up til now, I have developed and used a time consuming multistep process: 1) the basic medallion shape from a plastic blank, 2) the words using a photopolymer, i.e. rubber stamp, 3) handcarved bas relief in wax and 4) after multiple rtv molds and plastic intermediates I finally arrive at a working master mold from which I cold cast multiple award medallions.
To speed up the process, I started looking into "rapid prototyping". When i saw the price I then started looking into building something that would suffice. When I saw that the likely time to completion/complexity were over my head, I started searching for an off the shelf proxy--affordable desktop cnc router or mill. Then my head exploded with all of the possibilities-jewelry, metal fabrication, big, little, hobby, making money.....
So here I am. Probably like many out there I am burningly anxious to get started immediately because I can see/dream about all that is cool about cnc/rapid prototyping, but I have no experience in cnc anything.
At the moment I am tormenting myself about possibly one of the K2 desktop cnc routers, or something off of ebay like the sable 2015, zenbot cnc mill/router.
Any help/suggestions on these or other machines would be greatly appreciated.
Steve M