Home shop made Wire Electrical Discharge Machine

[MeJasonT]

Jon,
Playing devils advocate, I'm sorry but watching the first video is predominately pointing towards the arc generator and its availability for sale.
All credit to Mike for passing on some inspiration and reasoning for the application and function of EDM, I would like to encourage Mike to teach and show principles for building an EDM as this would then justify his correct placement as a homemadetools tool maker.

There were a number of statements made within the video which quite clearly promote the generator as a commercial product.

I myself have been following Ben Flemings publication for building my own EDM and i am fully aware that Mike has used this as his source for his spark generator.

Its only fair to have Mikes EDM judged by his peers no this site, we only need another 10 jurors. My opinion is that Mikes EDM has merit and should be included in the forum despite being dangerously close to being commercial. The reason for my vote is - it encourages and informs others and for those who lack mechanical ability his free distribution of information towards the construction of an EDM machine is invaluable.

EDM wont take over the world like 3D printing or home built CNC milling/plasma machines but pushing this subject to the masses deserves credit by itself.
I could list 20 commercial machine shops in my local area and only one has an EDM, even they are lucky if it gets used once a month. Ben Fleming gives a good introduction to the history of EDM in his book, in real terms as far as machining goes its a relatively young production method. Unfortunately it has been very quickly superseded by laser and waterjet. It is however a very useful tool for machining deep parts where milling has issues with stresses in the material/part. My pals at a local shop (the one with the EDM) cut a "U" shaped fork in a block of stainless steel for a client some 3" deep. I'm informed that this would have been difficult to mill as the flex in the tooling for the depth required and the stress on the material would have rendered the part inaccurate.

The price of the generator is not massively expensive, if you price up the transformer, capacitors and resistors required to store/create the arc which come to a canny price on their own even for building Ben's EDM.

The parts shown in the video look to be cut using a well calibrated wire EDM, is this correct Mike. If I win the loto one of those generators has my name on it.
(apparently so in second part of video above - BAXEDM Custom EDM Machine Build, Part 2 : Overview)

So is selling the generator wrong - No, how many times has MacMaster Carr been mentioned on this site.