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I read your response until near the very end and was itching to replying "but EDM!" before I got to your last paragraph! I actually was lucky enough to be able

I read your response until near the very end and was itching to replying "but EDM!" before I got to your last paragraph! I actually was lucky enough to be able to use EDM for my initial prototype and I remain absolutely confounded as to what degree of accuracy, precision, and repeatability we're able to get out of this fairly old machining technique (and one that also avoids the z-depth issues you pointed out), but it has its drawbacks. It's insanely slow (though I don't know if machines made this side of 1990 are appreciably any faster) and it's too expensive for anything other than prototyping or one-off bespoke designs, and of course there are limitations to what materials you can cut. > The only economical way to accurately cut large pieces of thick material [..] Fortunately for most real-world applications the old maxim about size and required precision being inversely correlated tends to hold. I was a die-hard subtractive machining zealot but I've slowly come around to appreciating 3D printers and they've made incredible strides in terms of capabilities and accuracy over the past decade. The hobbyist stuff still has some ways to go, but the exponential improvements are hard to ignore and I think it's become a viable suggestion for a lot of things were 2D machining used to reign king, at least where the end goal is to make something and not specifically to machine something.

jacquesm 3y ago
The pairing of 3D printers and small lasercutters is like a fabbing super power. It's absolutely amazing what I can cook up in a matter of hours here on effectively 3 square meters. But I still miss my machine shop :) EDM is as slow as it was in the past, there have been incremental improvements but nothing that would make you go 'oh' and of course the waste in the wire is still as much a factor (and one that makes me dislike EDM but the capabilities are off the scale in terms of precision, cut depth and consistency, in machining everything has its price). One thing that I've noticed the last couple of months is that you need to change your way of thinking about this stuff. If you 'can't make it' you need to think of what you can make and then adapt your design to that. This is far more productive than to stick to the 'proper' way of doing things. Suddenly two - admittedly - fairly crappy machines outperform my old shop in many ways. I really miss the ability that my 12 KW plasmacutter gave me in terms of cutting metal with accuracy and speed. But material hardening was a drawback as was the metal vapor and the conical kerf. By re-working some of the designs to use wood instead of metal and 3D printed parts where the 2D process isn't enough I find I can make almost anything that I could make before as long as it is for indoors use and strength isn't the main factor. Nothing beats metal and welding in that department. Before getting a 3D printer and the laser cutter I would still cut metal, grind and weld pretty much regularly. But now it's a rarity, and I suspect that once I get the hang of high tech plastics that it will become even more so.

jacquesm 3y ago

The pairing of 3D printers and small lasercutters is like a fabbing super power. It's absolutely amazing what I can cook up in a matter of hours here on effectively 3 square meters. But I still miss my machine shop :) EDM is as slow as it was in the past, there have been incremental improvements but nothing that would make you go 'oh' and of course the waste in the wire is still as much a factor (and one that makes me dislike EDM but the capabilities are off the scale in terms of precision, cut depth and consistency, in machining everything has its price). One thing that I've noticed the last couple of months is that you need to change your way of thinking about this stuff. If you 'can't make it' you need to think of what you can make and then adapt your design to that. This is far more productive than to stick to the 'proper' way of doing things. Suddenly two - admittedly - fairly crappy machines outperform my old shop in many ways. I really miss the ability that my 12 KW plasmacutter gave me in terms of cutting metal with accuracy and speed. But material hardening was a drawback as was the metal vapor and the conical kerf. By re-working some of the designs to use wood instead of metal and 3D printed parts where the 2D process isn't enough I find I can make almost anything that I could make before as long as it is for indoors use and strength isn't the main factor. Nothing beats metal and welding in that department. Before getting a 3D printer and the laser cutter I would still cut metal, grind and weld pretty much regularly. But now it's a rarity, and I suspect that once I get the hang of high tech plastics that it will become even more so.