We recently ordered a set of end mills designed for aluminum and got around to putting one of them through the paces. It worked exceptionally well, letting us cut a lot more aggressively than we were able to with standard multi-purpose carbide end mills.
At first we did some testing, pushing the end mill with different speeds and feeds. We were able to push the machine to 1mm depth of cut and around 800mm/min feed rates. While having chips weld itself to the end mill was a problem with older end mills, we didn’t have any problems with the new end mills.
With this project, we found the middle ground and used a 0.5mm depth of cut at 600mm/min on quarter inch 6061 aluminum.
So what did we learn? End mills for aluminum work really well on aluminum (obviously) and that we can put the Mill One a lot harder through aluminum than we thought we could as long as things are set up right.
Fluctuating oil prices, a new American president, rising interest rates in Canada – the past year has been quite a ride with regards to the North American economy and the foreign exchange rates. This is a fairly important aspect of our company due to the fact that the majority of our customers reside in the US and our primary transaction currency is USD (although you can also choose to use CAD).
Over the last year or so, the USD to CAD exchange rate plummeted from 1USD = 1.35CAD to 1USD = 1.22CAD, 9.6% drop.
While most of our income comes in as USD, most of our costs are in CAD. Since the majority of manufacturing is done locally (our furthest manufacturer is a one hour drive from Waterloo, ON), and since we pay all our salaries, taxes, shipping fees, rent, and packaging in CAD, we need to convert our USD income to CAD before we can pay for these costs. A falling USD value means less CAD when we convert our USD income to CAD.
It’s not all bad however, in the long term, a strong Canadian dollar means stronger international buying power and lower prices on items which are tied to the American dollar. Although we try to manufacture components as locally as possible, we will see some savings on imported components like motors and electronics.
So what this mean for our customers? Well for our Canadian customers, this is a great time to place orders while the CAD is strong. It’s like a discount granted by the strengthening Canadian economy! Perhaps this is why we’ve seen a small uptick in Canadian sales.
I figured it would be of interest to share with everyone, especially if you’re also a business which is also affected by these fluctuation foreign exchange rates. While economic instability makes running a company more complicated, I have a good feeling of things to come in the future.
When’s the next machine coming out? When are you guys going to build a bigger machine? These are questions we get all the time. Over the last few months, we’ve been looking at many of the details involved with building a larger machine, such as the feature set, cost, and manufacturing of the new product. Some of our discussions includes talks with current customers, industry professionals, members of the maker community, and more. Here are some of the things we’ve heard from them.
Larger work area:
People want to have more work area to do larger projects, anywhere from a few inches larger than the work area of the Mill One, to a full 4’x8’x machine. In between these sizes, we need to pick one (or maybe two) sizes that will satisfy the majority of the needs of makers, as well as being compact enough to fit into any workspace.
Full enclosure:
While the partial enclosure of the Mill One works reasonably well in capturing the majority of dust and chips, it still lets some more ambitious particles to leave the inside of the machine. A full enclosure will greatly increase safety, reduce noise, and make cleanup easier. While this feature hasn’t been as popular as the large work area one, since we use our CNC machines all the time, we know what sort of difference this feature could make.
Network capability:
The ability to connect to a CNC machine without being tethered to a computer or laptop is a feature many of our customers have wanted to have on their Mill Ones. This means developing some sort of physical or digital interface with the machine.
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These are just a few of the things that folks have wanted. Make sure to let us know what you think should be in the next machine, and stay tuned for more news!
We are currently out of stock on the Ridgid 24012 routers and customers who are purchasing the Mill One will have to order a router from another source for the time being until we have new stock.
Luckily, you can find both the Maktia and the Ridgid routers for around $99USD (at the time of writing) through Home Depot with free shipping. This is the same price as what have offered. Check out this guide on choosing a router here: https://sienci.com/choosing-a-router-for-your-mill-one/. We recommend purchasing the routers listed in the guide.
Due to price increases for the routers from our supplier, we are currently looking at some other alternatives for routers at this moment. We are hoping to find a less expensive but equally durable and capable tool to go along with the Mill One.
If you need help with purchasing a router for your Mill One, feel free to send us an email at hi@sienci.com!
Choosing the right settings on a Mill One can be a tricky process if you don’t know where to start. That’s why we made a short guide on understanding the terminology and theory on picking the right feeds, speeds, and other settings on your Mill One.
This is still an early version of our guide. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, and more, feel free to get in touch with us at hi@sienci.com
A couple of users have mentioned that they had some difficulty with pushing the ACME nut into the ACME nut holder because the center hole caused too tight of a fit. While everyone did get their Mill Ones put together, this did cause some sore thumbs. This is just a quick update to let everyone know that we have since added an extra bit of clearance to account for this.
We have been printing the newest version of the ACME nut mount for the last few weeks to go into kits, so these ACME nut mounts have already been phased into new kits being shipped out.
If you are planning on printing your own, the latest version of this part has been uploaded to Thingiverse.
Chris and I are back from vacation and are resuming our normal schedules. Here’s a nice view of Mt Rainier in Washington.
If you placed an order from Aug 9 to Aug 16, your order will be shipped out today. All shipments for Aug 3 to Aug 8 has already been shipped out by our friend Adil.
Orders going on forward will be shipped out typically within one or two days. If you have any questions, feel free to send us an email at hi@sienci.com!
I (Andy) usually try to blog at least two times a week, but things have been pretty busy since sales for the Mill One have picked up a fair amount over the last two or three weeks, so I haven’t had a chance to blog.
So here’s a bunch of stuff that has happened over the last few weeks (in no particular chronological order).
Wooden iPhone Case Video
I put together another video to showcase a project you can do with the Mill One. I found a 3D model of the iPhone 6 case online, which I modified a bit and cut in half, so I could made the bottom from poplar and the top from oak. The whole milling process took about one and a half hours using a 2mm bit.
The phone case came out really well, and looks pretty stylish. My friend Lily let me borrow her phone to model in this video since I had a thick screen protector on my phone that got in the way, so thank you to her!
Tom’s unboxing update
So we sent Tom Salanderer a Mill One to test out and review. You might have watched the livestream unboxing where he went and put everything together, but had some issues with sending the gcode (he was using incompatible software – not the machine’s fault).
On the next day, the video was set to private. Here’s why:
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here’s what happened. The first part of the assembly went fairly smoothly. However near the end, with all the software, Tom got aggravated with all the unhelpful comments on the livestream chat, especially since it was past midnight in Germany. So he decided to end the livestream and put out a video later about the Mill One in more detail.
The livestream is back online and you can check it out here:
New T-shirts
New t shirts. We have 14 of them (someone bought one from us already) in small, medium, and large. What should we do with them? Should we sell them on the store? Should we do a giveaway? Let us know via email or through social media!
Vacation time
I will be heading out to see family in BC this week and returning to Ontario on the 15th. Chris will be out for a few days starting on the 10th. We have someone else taking care of fulfillment and so orders placed between the 3rd and the 15th will be shipped within a week. If you have an urgent order, send us a message and we can arrange something.
It’s been pretty busy at Sienci Labs, and we haven’t had a chance to make any new videos for a while. It’s been about a month since our last “What’s on the Mill” upload. Well don’t worry, because we will have some new videos up in the next couple weeks.
If you follow our Facebook page, you might have seen some photos of Terence from Soul Media Lab filming a new video. That’s because we’re working on a new commercial for the Mill One!
If you don’t recognize the name, Terence shot our Kickstarter video last year, and since then, he has been growing his video production company very quickly. The plan is to have a new video out near the end of the month or beginning of August.
We are also working with another video company in Waterloo (details to come out soon) to help us make some more videos on milling projects. We hope that these new videos will help inspire users to try different projects with the Mill One and show them how easy it is to get started.
Make sure to follow our Youtube channel for the latest video content. We’re almost at 500 subscribers!
Over the last few weeks, we had the chance to talk with a couple teachers about some of the struggles they face when using a CNC machine in the classroom. While teachers want to teach CNC milling in the classroom, the options they had for classroom appropriate machines were all either too expensive, difficult to use, or not robust enough. Many schools actually already had a CNC machine in the tech classrooms, but all of them were not used for years due to the fact that teachers didn’t know how to use them, thus was not able to teach students how to use it. Or, because of the high cost of the machine and the budget constraints, machines would sit broken and unused for long periods of time without someone to repair them.
What makes the Mill One different is the fact that it was designed for beginners. We know that learning the techniques to go from idea to milling a part can be daunting to learn. There’s little room for mistakes, because running your crashing your CNC can be costly. That’s why we built the machine to be easy to use and easy to fix, and that’s why 70% of our users first learn CNC milling on the Mill One.
We’ve already dropped of a bunch of CNC machines to the schools in our area and now have plans to put over a dozen Mill Ones in schools across Ontario for the coming school year. Our teachers are planning on using their machines for projects like making custom circuits, passive phone amplifiers, and wooden gumball machines. It feel really great to know that folks are also seeing the Mill One as an educational tool, and that we are making CNC milling technology accessible for students as well. Some of the teachers have taken their Mill Ones home for the summer to try different things, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how things go when the students go back to school!
