If you’ve been waiting to order a 1/4″ to 1/8″ collet adapter, they are now back in stock on our store.
We also have 60 degree v bits available for sale on our store as well. These bits great for doing v carving or engraving smaller projects like PCBs or tags.
Also, make sure to use coupon code “newstock” to get $10 off any order over $50 until Friday Feb 9, 2018!
Troy, a.k.a tmbarbour has put out some really cool instructables on adding some new functionality to the Mill One! You might know him from his Add Homing Switches to a Sienci Mill One CNC project, and he’s made some other cool changes to his machine.
This instructable walks you through adding a Z axis probe to the Mill One using the built in pins on the CNC V3 Shield. This makes it a lot easier to automate the process of finding the Z height of your workpiece.
Knowing the RPM of your spindle can help you get more consistent results out of your Mill One. Not only that, it’s a cool little add on that’s fairly inexpensive and fun to make. Troy’s instructable covers everything you need to know to make your own.
Thanks to feedback and community contributions, we have made several changes to the Mill One design that make it better, stronger, and more reliable. Most of these changes are shipping now, and new units come with changelogs that detail changes to assembly that may not be listed in the official V2 assembly manual.
This list will cover the most major changes to the design, all of which can be found on Onshape. Please note that some of the designs may be in progress, partially complete, or have been created to just try out different ideas. We will update our Thingiverse and other open source documentation in the future once designs have been finalized.
Several users have made the mod of adding additional mounting points to the Z axis for the router mount for more flexibility in mounting options or to add other larger, heavier routers to the Mill One. New Mill Ones now come with two additional M8 mounting points on the Z axis rail and a larger, more solid router mount. With the taller mount, users can adjust the router up and down in the mount to allow for more clearance for vices and other work holding apparatus. This change greatly increases the stiffness of the Z axis, allowing the Mill One take more aggressive cuts.
As some users may have noticed, the 200mm lead screw sticks out slightly from the bottom of the Z axis rail. Although formerly this is not an issue since the router extends further down than the lead screw, with the larger router mount, users can move the position of the router up or down which could cause interference with the lead screw and the workpiece. To prevent this, the 200mm lead screws have been changed to 150mm lead screws. Please note that this does not affect the Z axis travel.
The new electronics holder improves on the older version of the electronics holder in two ways. One, it allows for the use non-screw on type female DC jacks, which are far more common than the screw on type which were used before. This means folks who are building their own Mill Ones can reproduce this component more easily. Second, we have changed from using a friction based clip to hold on the cover of the electronics holder to using a flexible clip based design. This means that no only it is much easier to clip on and off, but makes it much more unlikely that the cover will fall off during transportation. This design change makes it a lot easier to print on a wider variety of 3D printers since the new clip design allows for more variance in print tolerances.
One of our former suppliers has stopped supplying a specific type of ACME nut which includes an M3 thread in each mounting poin. This means that we are reverting back to a more commonly available version of ACME nut without those threads. Users of the V1 version of the Mill One will know that this is typically the most finicky part of assembling the Mill One due to the fact that the M3 hardware is really small. To fix this in the current version, we will be pre-assembling the ACME nuts with brass nuts included. With the help of a jig and a electric screwdriver, we can produce these parts fairly quickly, so to save folks the trouble of having to put them together themselves, we’ll be doing it for you.
2)
If you’re looking for a fast and inexpensive way to prototype circuit boards, the Mill One is an awesome machine for that. Check out Chuck’s video on how he’s using the Mill One to create his custom circuit boards!
Hey everyone, we’re back from vacation! Happy New Year everyone!
We’ll be shipping out our backlog of orders from the winter break as quickly as we can. We’re also in the middle of setting up a new office as well, ordering and getting new inventory in, and packaging, so things are quite hectic. But we’re back, and that’s what matters!
Over the last few months, we’ve had a lot of folks build their own Mill Ones from scratch or buy some parts from us to complete their builds. We want to support anyone and everyone who wants access to affordable CNC machines, and we’ve done our best to provide the resources and tools to do that through the Mill One project. One of the members of the Sienci Mill One Group asked if we were able to provide more options with the kit, to pick and choose which components the kit includes. In a perfect world, that would be the most ideal. People can just get what they need and nothing more. However, things are a little more complicated than that. This is my response:
”
It’s been something we’ve been considering. However there’s a few reasons we have tried to keep things as simple as possible.
One is that we want to be able to keep a close eye on the quality of all the parts. If we have a customer that made their own parts that don’t work properly or are not to spec, it is a lot more difficult to help them. We’ve made hundreds of each part so we have a lot of experience making sure the quality is as good as possible, and fixing issues for our customers if there are any. I think it is a much smoother experience for our customers to have everything from us.
Second is that we want to make every choice as simple as possible to make it as affordable as possible. Every variation on the kit we add will make it more expensive because we have to pack every machine differently. It’s a lot easier for us to pack everything the same and have only one or two choices, and those cost savings can be passed along to the customer. Sure, maybe they can save some money by only getting what they need, but overall, it will make things more expensive for everyone. We order everything in large batches to keep costs down as well. If we had to make or buy stock in smaller batches which is what we’d need to do if we separated the kit up, that would also greatly increase the cost.
Third and lastly, getting all the parts from us saves a lot of time and effort for the customer, and if you were to source all the components separately, it would probably cost the same or more, not including the extra time it takes to source and manufacture each part.
”
What are your thoughts on this decision? Any ideas on how we can support our community better?
Feel free to reach out at hi@sienci.com
Hey everyone! This is a notice to let everyone know that the company will be away on holidays between Dec 23rd and Jan 2nd. Orders placed during this time will start shipping out at the beginning of January.
We will continue to ship out orders up to the 22nd. If your order is time sensitive, please contact us first at hi@sienci.com so that we can make sure it will get to you on time.
Although we will be away spending time with friends and family, we will continue to periodically check our emails and be active on our Facebook user group to help our community and customers. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us as usual!
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about how things are going at Sienci Labs. Well the answer is that things are going well. It’s been hard to get the time to sit down and blog as I usually do, especially with the Christmas rush and getting everything ready for 2018!
Here’s a few things that have been going on lately.
Our company has grown to the point that Chris and I need more hands on deck to grow. That’s why over the last two months, we’ve been looking for new people to help us run the business. Well I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten lots of job applications and are currently in the middle of onboarding two new people to our team! Stay tuned for updates and intros on our new team members.
If you’re interested in joining our team, feel free to reach out to work@sienci.com. We’ll probably be looking for folks in electrical or software engineering in the next few months as well.
A masters student in mechanical engineering and I are working on designing a fully enclosed frame, which we plan on putting together as a new upgrade kit. Why a full enclosure? Well, a full enclosure results in a quieter, cleaner machine. The plan is to have first physical prototypes together in the next two weeks.
We’re currently working on a modified version of Kiri:Moto to streamline the CNC workflow for CAM. This has been a ongoing project for nearly a month, and we’re working on setting up a server to run the program. It’ll be accessible with the public, which will help us gain feedback on improving the software.
We’re also working on creating a more streamlined resources page to help new users walk through each step of using the Mill One. This includes some sample projects that can be done to get users familiar with our machines. We hope to have the new version of our resources live in the next two weeks. Got an idea for a sample project? Email us at hi@sienci.com!
First change was adjusting the settings and tolerances on the electronics box to improve the quality of the print and allow the parts to fit together better.
Second change is with the router mount, which now has additional reinforcement around the bolt holes. This addresses the weak area around the nut traps on the mount.
If you haven’t yet, check out Chuck’s first impressions with the Mill One.
We did have a few troubles with the assembly part, but we did figure them out. We’re always happy to have honest feedback and hear about what we can do to improve our machines and manufacturing so that we can continue to improve our product.
Once Chuck got everything running, he was really happy with the machine!
You can also check out his video on making a custom 3D printed holder for tools on the Mill One too.
We recently sold out on all our end mills, but we just got a new batch of aluminum cutting end mills. You can check it out here.
UPS has recently offered us really competitive prices on shipping, with shipping speeds that are faster than Purolator. Based on the past week of shipping with UPS, it looks like customers can get their orders up to three days faster than before.
Those are all of the updates I can think of. Stay tuned for more as they come and happy holidays!
Every year, Make Magazine brings together the best desktop fabrication tools together for their annual Digital Fabrication Shootout. Guess who’s also in the Shootout? We are! Check it out!
We’ve started shipping with nylock nuts. For most folks, this won’t make a huge difference, but it does add a level of security from having the M3 nuts back off over time, especially if you use your Mill One all the time. We try to keep finding ways to improve our products, of course, even if they’re small changes!
If you want to get an Anti Backlash Nut Kit, use the coupon code “10ABL” at checkout to get $10USD off the kit. The code will work until Nov 30!
