Category: General News

We put together the machine using the new frames and started carving a couple of things.

Here’s a picture of our progress with a 3D carving of a crater on the lunar surface:

According to our tests, we can achieve precision of about +/- 0.03mm in wood, which is slightly less than the thickness of a human hair. We’re still making a couple of adjustments to the machine, so hopefully that number will go down.

Due to some bearing wobble and flex in the XZ gantry, milling aluminum has been a bit tricky and the finish is not great. We’ll be milling the XZ gantry from steel or aluminum (it’s currently acrylic) as planned in the design which should help stiffen up the machine.

Chris has also been putting together a new 3D printer using the angle aluminum rail systems, and so far things look awesome. The design for the Y and Z axis is more or less complete and all that is left is to make the X axis, mount the printing bed, wire it up, and start printing!

I went to go pick up a set of frames milled by a CNC machine in Brampton, ON from Sawdust and Noise today as I was heading back from the Maker Festival Launch Party.

Why do we mill our frames using a $90,000 CNC machine? These CNC machines can achieve extremely high levels of precision (+/- 0.001″) that is needed to make our desktop CNC machines precise as well.

Tim just started a Twitter account to give you updates on everything that is going on.

Follow us at @SienciLabs!

Tim and I had a great time at the showcase yesterday. Gave out a lot of free timbits and business cards, and we certainly got a lot of interest in our product and company!

Oh and by the way, we updated our design. It’s has a much stronger frame, which means faster feedrates, better quality finish, and a more durable machine.

Hey guys, we just got confirmation that we will have a booth at the Toronto Maker Festival. Feel free to come by to check out our machine and chat!

The Toronto Maker Festival is happening on July 9th and 10th. It’s a free event open to everyone at the Reference Library. More details are coming out soon, and we’ll make sure to update you as time goes by.

I also wanted to mention that we will also have a booth at the Startup Showcase hosted by the Entrepreneurship Society at UWaterloo at the University of Waterloo’s Student Life Centre. The event is on Thursday, from 11am to 3pm, so if you are in the area, come by to say hi as well!

Since we have the prototype up and running, we’ve had a bunch of fun testing it out by making some cool things.

The wood router bits came in so we were able to try doing some engravings with them. The carbide endmills and ballmills just arrived today so keep an eye out for milled metal.

So I printed out a mount for our 20 dollar rotary tool and stuck it onto the machine to test. We haven’t gotten any router bits for the Makita spindle yet, but we did have the rotary tool on hand so I thought we might as well try carving stuff out.

We carved out “Hello world” using G-code generated from Makercam and a diamond cone burr bit. Looks pretty good!

I assembled the parts we’ve been printing on the Wanhao for the last couple of days and wired it to the controller, and it’s working pretty well. Check out the video for our makeshift testing setup to see it in action.

We’ve had our 3D printer, the Tevo Tarantula, for just under two months, and it has served us beautifully. I decided on picking up a new printer due to the fact that it kept breaking down and needing maintenance, and so the plan is to take apart the Tarantula and use the parts to build new machines.

The Tarantula decided to start doing weird things in the z axis and I finally pulled the trigger in purchasing a new printer.

So we purchased a new Wanhao i3 Duplicator on Friday, and Tim brought it back from Richmond Hill last night. It took about 20 minutes to set up and we were printing right away.

Besides a mishap involving the spool falling out in the middle of the night, everything has been working great! Long live the Duplicator!

We’ve been working hard for the last few weeks to iterate and design our desktop CNC machine design and here’s a rendered CAD image of where we are right now.

Before putting in the electronics, we have just over 160 parts. Compared to other desktop CNC milling machines, this is an incredibly low number (about 280-300 on the Shapeoko BOM and X Carve BOM) but we’re still working on finding ways to do more with less parts, simplifying assembly, and making repairs easy.