Author: siencilabs

Some of the people we meet in public have been asking about Tim, one of the guys who was in our Kickstarter, and what he’s been up to.

Since the early days of Sienci Labs, Tim has been working with me in many aspects of the early development of the Sienci Mill One. From doing machining and prototyping for the early iterations, as well as putting in early investments into the company, Tim helped jumpstart the company and bring about the first working prototypes. Since then, he has done extensive work in online marketing, social media, and public relations.

Since the end of our Kickstarter, Tim has been finding new opportunities in research, and as an brilliant academic minded person, something more suited to the career path he intends to pursue. A

Since our University requires students to be part of the co-op program, Tim plans to work at a firm in Ontario doing finite element analysis, or find an internship in the US. However, he has been working with Chris and myself in all sides of the business. We still pretty much see each other every day.

Anyways, tomorrow is his birthday, so here’s a photo of his hair after I cut it for him a few weeks ago. Happy birthday Tim.

As you might know, several of the parts on the Sienci Mill One are 3D printed. With all of the orders we are filling this means there is a lot of 3D printing to do! To meet the demand, we have several 3D printers dedicated to making parts for the Sienci Mill One, working almost 24 hours a day.

If you read our previous blog posts, we ordered two new Maker Select 3D printers. Unfortunately one of the printers had bad LMU88 linear bearings on the Y axis, and so we had to get it sent back. We’ve ordered another one which should arrive in the next few days.

Here’s a photo of our current setup:

Chris and I went to Walmart last night to pick up one of these shelves to put our 3D printers on, and soon enough, it will be full of 3D printers!

We also went to Mississauga to pick up 25kg of 3D printer filament. It should keep us busy for about a week and a half, but it looks like we’re going to have to order more soon. Luckily we were able to get a really good deal on them, and the quality has been quite good. If you’re in the Kitchener/Waterloo area and want us to pick some filament up for you the next time we go, feel free to email us!

Assembly on the Sienci Mill One just got a little easier. The router mounts, ACME nut holders, and angle mounts will all come with nut traps that will hold your nuts in place as you tighten them. By doing this, we’ve been able to eliminate the need for almost all wrenches except for a 8mm socket wrench, which is used to adjust the preload on the v wheels.

We will upload the updated files over the next few weeks, so watch out for them on Thingiverse!

You know when you’ve just ordered a lot of parts when the weight of the package that’s going to show up at your door is nearly 360KG (about 800lbs for the Americans). We finally completed negotiations with one of our major suppliers in China and have a lot of things coming our way soon. There are a couple minor things we still need to get, but since they are fairly low value items, I feel like a weight has been lifted off my back.

What’s left to order are USB cables, clamps, and eccentric nuts. So a little bit of online shopping to do.

According to our aluminum supplier, the aluminum angle should have arrived at the machining facilities yesterday and should be ready to be picked up in one or two weeks. I will check in later and see how things are going with that.

In terms of the 3D printed parts that are used in the Sienci Mill One, we have decided to purchase two new 3d printers (Maker Select V2’s) to print out the parts, and also work with Andrew Netherton  from Netherton Solutions (Hi Andrew, I know you’re reading this blog!) with his Makerbot. Andrew is one of our backers, and it’s pretty cool to have him on board to help us. We’re figuring out the most optimal settings to get the best parts out of his 3D printer, but we should be churning out new parts soon!

So in total, that’s five 3D printers that will be chugging away. A sixth when Chris’s Cetus printer that he backed on Kickstarter shows up (estimated delivery date is November, but who knows what the actual delivery date will be). Nevertheless, we should be able to make the parts fairly quickly, and keep up continuous manufacturing after the Kickstarter batch of machines have been made.

The parts we have already received, Chris and I have been using our spare time to count them out and throw them into baggies, and organize our stock. We will continue to do so as things arrive, and once we have enough items, we can purchase boxes and other packing materials so start assembling the kits.

To finish up, I wanted to mention that our friends at Waterloop: The Canadian SpaceX Hyperloop Competition Team have launched a Kickstarter to help fund the development of a super high speed train system. Check it out, and show them some love!

Production keeps moving along at Sienci Labs. We’ve recently placed our orders for the aluminum rails and production will be starting next Tuesday. One of the companies we had the chance to visit during the summer graciously offered to help us manufacture the aluminum parts. JGW Machine Ltd has worked with many startups in the Waterloo Region, and I guess we’re one of their next. We hope to be able to pick up the aluminum in about two weeks.

In other news, I managed to fixed one of the 3D printers. We’ve been doing most of the printing with one of the printers upstairs, but I took some of the parts from the Tevo Tarantula that Tim and I bought together (we took it apart for the parts) and put it into the Wanhao Duplicator i3 that we bought in the summer. So I’ve been churning out these ACME leadscrew nut holders that will go into the first batch of Sienci Mill Ones.

Something that Chris and I have been discussing is whether we should purchase additional 3D printers to 3D print our own parts or have another company do it for us. If you have any suggestions on reliable printers that are of good value, feel free to let us know!

We’ve been getting a steady stream of parts from our Chinese suppliers, like the delrin V wheels, CNC V3 shields, and a few other small things, but for the large stuff, we’ve held off ordering them since the plan was to order them with Inksmith. Turns out that they’ve decided to back out for now and we will not be doing a joint order with them. To keep to our production schedule, we will most likely be ordering the parts we’ve been holding off on in the next couple of days via Express shipping. This means it will be coming in within a week of ordering. It will cost a lot more to do it this way, but with everyone waiting for their machines, and plus with a fast growing waiting list,  building machines and putting together kits quickly is our priority.

I wanted to take a moment to thank the people who didn’t have the chance to back us on the Kickstarter but who have been emailing us with support, as well as asking us about when machines will be available next. Our first priority is to have our first batch go to our backers, but knowing that we will be able to continue a steady stream of sales going forward is really exciting, and we’ll continue to develop better designs and make desktop CNCing better for everyone.

We’ve been getting emails from people who missed out on the Kickstarter but are interested in purchasing a Sienci Mill One. Rest assured, we will have machines available for sale after the Kickstarter. Chris and I are still discussing the best strategy to fulfill orders after the first batch of machines have been shipped out.

Our current plan has been to take a portion of our profits that we’ve seen in our Kickstarter to order enough parts to build an additional 20-40 machines and offer those machines to the people who have been signing up to our waiting list at https://sienci.com/order-now/. We have not quite determined a post-Kickstarter pricing strategy yet, and we will share that with everyone once we’ve established that. We will also establish a system for our customers to order online over the next few months as we work on building our first set.

Once all of our machines from Kickstarter have been shipped out, we will start shipping out the next batch of orders. After that, we should be able to keep a larger inventory to shorten the lead times for each order to a few days. Hopefully by this time we will be able to establish a fulfillment plan in Europe, since shipping costs and time for overseas transport can be quite large.

Over the last couple of weeks after our Kickstarter, we’ve seen quite a bit of growth in the waiting list, and this will give us a sense of what demand there is for the Sienci Mill One. If you’re still interested in getting a Sienci Mill One, make sure to sign up to get first dibs on the second batch!

So if you didn’t know, it takes Kickstarter and the payment system that it uses a couple of weeks to charge our backer’s credit cards and process the payments. So about two and a half weeks after our Kickstarter, we finally got that money.

This past week or so, we’ve been ordering stuff and getting prepared to start putting kits together. We’ve ordered a couple of things like the v wheels, header jumpers, CNC shields, bits and endmills, and some packaging materials, which will take between two to six week to arrive. We will be ordering everything else we will need over the next couple weeks and organizing everything into bags.

A couple of parts that come straight from manufacturers will most likely take the longest to process since we are negotiating shipping terms, packaging requirements, and checking specs so that we are 100% certain we are getting what we need.

On the local manufacturing side, we’re currently preparing to order materials for drilling and threading holes into the aluminum rails with a large shop that we’ve had the chance to visit during the summer. We’re waiting on them to send us the details we need for this shipping instructions, and we’ll get that material over to the manufacturer.

With the frame and gantry parts (the other major component that is manufactured locally) we are currently creating the appropriate files and documentation our manufacturers need, which will take a little while.

Our focus right now is on ordering all the parts we need from overseas as soon as we can since shipping times can be long. After, we will start having parts manufactured locally. Thankfully, the items to be made locally are not complicated and have fairly short lead times.

Chris and I were at the Startup Showcase at the University of Waterloo Student Life Centre to chat with students and faculty members about our company and projects. We met a lot of familiar faces as well as a lot of new people who we got to chat to about CNC technology. There were also a lot of great up and coming companies ranging developing technologies in VR, student housing communications platforms, multiplayer gaming platforms, 3D printing, and more!

While we were there, we also made a little pen holder for Lindsay who was at the booth for the Conrad Entrepreneurship and Business Centre.

Thank you everyone for coming out! It was a lot of fun! Also a special thank you to EntSoc for putting this event together!

Check out the new design on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1796494

We made some small changes to the design of the angle mount that connects the motor, frame, and aluminum rails together to be easier to 3D print and a bit stronger as well.

The previous version of the angle mount was designed to act as a mock up of the part made out of sheet metal to test how well the part would fit into the machine. However, a couple of weeks ago, our friends at Inksmith have offered to 3D print the parts for our first batch of Kickstarter machines, so we’ve changed the design slightly for 3D printing.

This part can drop in as a replacement for any Sienci Mill One out in the field and can be printed on most FDM 3D printers in 1-1.5 hours.

Hey everyone, if you haven’t noticed, we’ve been uploading a lot of files online for everyone who’s interested in building or modifying a Sienci Mill One. There are a lot of things to document, and we have a little more wading around to do in our files to make sure everything is up to date. Github is kind of tricky to figure out (according to Chris)

Why did we make our files available freely online? We believe that users should be able to modify their machines to the way that works for them, and for designers and inventors to build off of our designs and create even better CNC machines. That’s why we have done our best to optimize the design to be easy to manufacture, and the parts easy to find online or at the hardware store.

Here’s some links to where you can find files. Please use them at your own risk!

Github: https://github.com/SienciLabs/Sienci-Mill-One

Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/SienciLabs/designs

There are still a lot of things we need to put up online and a couple of design revisions since we have made these files available. Feel free to let us know if we’re missing anything, or need additional info.

More resources can be found here: https://sienci.com/resources/