Home shop made Wire Electrical Discharge Machine

Hi,

Over the last few years, I've designed, build and perfected a DIY home shop wire-EDM machine, which is now steadily churning out quality parts every day. I've open sourced the mechanics (available for download on baxedm.com), and the electronics can be sourced from dynomotion.com (for the CNC control) and baxedm.com (for the arc generator).
Here's a tutorial on how to build such a machine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynhM...0bGtBaVs7xoMLo

And here are a few videos with examples of what quality parts you can make with such a DIY machine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuI3vj0prnw&t=116s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcTQoy_tBp4&t=10s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvzneuHc0Sk&t=138s

Don't you just love how this website provides cheap advertising for commercial products.

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Originally Posted by Crusty

Don't you just love how this website provides cheap advertising for commercial products.

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I got an invitation from a homemadetools.net admin on YouTube to post here, so I did. Otherwise I would have not. The arc generator is a commercial product indeed, however the mechanics are completely open source and free for anyone to use.

My apologies - there's been a recent influx of Tubers here posting apparently to increase their YT traffic.

It would be very nice to have a home EDM but the cost is still prohibitive to me.

That's true - we actually edit and delete commercial content and spam daily here! Just a few minutes ago I zapped a spam post, and moved an unboxing vid out of the main Homemade Tools subforum. YouTube in particular can be a crazy environment, with a lot of companies (*cough*, Banggood, *cough*) now seeking out "influencers" to do product reviews, unboxing vids, etc. YT itself is now muddying the waters by double-advertising on their videos.

We tend to weigh commerciality against the intellectual value of the content. So, if someone is producing high-quality homemade tool content, we're usually OK with them selling their plans or encouraging subscriptions or Patreons or whatever, within reason. We DON'T want people shilling for Ryobi or some such, but we DO want to support legitimate homemade tool builders.

Another tool we have at our disposal is our daily newsletter. If we're uncertain about a video, we just exclude it from the newsletter, and it only gets one-tenth or one-twentieth of the traffic of a newsletter-promoted video. This is almost always what's happening when you see a thread that receives under 100 views. When you see threads consistently receive more and more views, it's the opposite: we promoted it in the newsletter, on the homepage, in ebooks, in our Best Homemade Tools subforum, etc.

Anyway, these videos look fine, and I hope we see more of them. :hattip:

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.

Hi Jason,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The parts shown in the video are all cut on my DIY machine, which is calibrated. The part accuracy is +/-0.01 mm (less than half a thousandths of an inch).
There is one thing that I should clarify. Ben Fleming's design has not been used as a base for the BAXEDM arc generator in any way. In fact, I looked briefly at Ben's design in the past and decided that I needed to design my own generator from scratch in order to get the performance that I was looking for. These are two very different machines, using different technologies and intended for different users. Bens design is great, and he gets a lot of kudos from me for getting EDM into the hands of people that want to try it out and like to tinker. The BAXEDM generator is intended for individuals and small businesses who really want to invest in making a performance custom machine.
I'll do my best to make lots videos about DIY EDM, to raise its popularity in the home shop. People can use my open source mechanical designs, and tips and tricks from my videos to build their own machines. Whether they buy an arc generator from BAXEDM, make Fleming's design or build one from scratch, that's up to them. My design examples and info is there to help out in their machine build and prevent them from making the same mistakes as I did.

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Originally Posted by Jon

YT itself is now muddying the waters by double-advertising on their videos. :hattip:

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Firefox, 3 adblockers(AdBlocker Ultimate, AdBlock Plus, uBlock Origin ) + NoScript = What advertising?

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Thanks BAXEDM! We've added your EDM Setup to our Machining category,
as well as to your builder page: BAXEDM's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

<div id="blocks"> <div class="block b1 pngfix"> <div class="bimg"> <div> <a href="http://www.homemadetools.net/homemade-edm-setup"> <img src="/uploads/224747/homemade-edm-setup.jpeg"/> </a> </div> </div> <div class="head pngfix"></div> <div class="left pngfix"></div> <div class="right pngfix"></div> <div class="blockover b1 pngfix"> <div class="title"> <a href="http://www.homemadetools.net/homemade-edm-setup">EDM Setup</a> <span> by <a href="http://www.homemadetools.net/builder/BAXEDM">BAXEDM</a></span> </div> <div class="tags">tags: <a href='http://www.homemadetools.net/tag/edm'>EDM</a> </div> </div> </div> </div>
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I have a keen interest in eventually obtaining my own wire EDM machine. either build or buy. briefly I owned an older commercial one which was missing many parts and the arc generator was completely fubar'ed No way to source parts where i was at the time and the machine was worth 10x in scrap to what I had in it.
Had Mike's arc generator been known to me back then the rest of the machine mat have been worth restoring If Mike's BX17 would have been enough of a power source.
But I would be more interested in a portable EDM hole machine for removing broken bolts I think.
Thanks' mark for sharing

I made a sinker EDM (aka Tap buster) based on a munge of Ben Fleming's earlier book (available on google docs, or archive.org from memory). It uses a capacitive discharge for the arc (disposable camera flash capacitors are great for this), and the rest is parts from ebay, jaycar, etc
the electrode is shaped from arc gouge electrodes, and works well enough.
some video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lRTh_a7YQg
I have enough projects waiting to complete before I look at wire EDM.