Mechanical Engineering student with big homemade dreams

[aw4cs]

Thanks for all the advice!

I definitely won't be going and buying a CNC machine right off the bat, in fact pretty much all of the machinery I'll need will be mostly homemade. I recognise the importance of making a machine that does the job simply and without hassle. I've worked in factories that had to manage downtime and often been stuck cleaning floors for 3 hours just because one of the many processes had failed to do its single job. In these times I often conjured up ideas of how to make the process more efficient.

I really do appreciate the control you get with manual work but there comes a point where the idea of manual work takes more time than it's worth, take a spur gear or helical gear for example. You can indeed make both of these manually on a mill or a lathe, but if I need to make 10 different sizes for each project then I'll get bored pretty quick. With the automation of this process I can spend more time working on stuff that needs that special touch

I tend to think of my ideal shop as something a single person can operate and run multiple automated processes and let them all run. Effectively having a machine for each part and then just assembling the final product like a big jigsaw puzzle! The best parallel I can figure is a car manufacturing plant.

But I digress, the three main things I need to obtain right now are a lathe, a mill, and a MIG welder. I'm pretty confident with those three machines I can build my army of automated d̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ manufacturing machines. I enjoy CAD modelling and manual work, but obviously I don't need to automate everything