Our latest adventure: CNC machining
Here’s a video about the adventure of moving our first big CNC machine into our shop and starting to use it to make aluminum drivetrain parts:
And here’s a photo of one of the first parts that we machined:
This CNC machine is a big investment and the start of an exciting journey for us. We’ve been making Supre Drive components with a combination of parts, some of which are 3D printed by us and some of which are machined out of aluminum by local machine shops. These machine shops have been awesome, but to keep costs down and to make sure we produce the best possible parts, we decided to embark on a journey of machining aluminum parts ourselves.
The first step was to buy an industrial CNC machine. An opportunity came up with the folks at North Shore Billet (a local machine shop) selling a Haas DT-1 CNC mill. It’s a 2012 model, so it’s not new but still very capable. After getting quoted crazy prices for companies to move the machine, we decided to fetch it ouselves. We borrowed a big pickup truck and a big trailer from neighbors and lined up forklifts at both ends of the journey, and got it done.
The first parts of the Supre Drive that we’re machining out of aluminum with our Haas DT-1 are the tensioner arm and two of the main parts in the derailleur. All three of these are big parts that we have been 3D printing out of carbon-filled nylon. We’ve been having difficulty with the reliability of 3D printing for these specific parts, so it’ll be a nice upgrade for them to be machined out of aluminum. 3D printing remains a great tool that we will continue to use for some of our other parts. CNC machining is a fundamentally different process of starting with a block of material and removing material until you have your part, whereas in 3D printing, material is added until you have your part. The design of the parts ends up being very different just to optimize them for the different fabrication method.
We can now machine our own tensioner arms, and we’re working on the derailleur parts. The learning curve has been huge, but we’re having lots of fun. We hope you enjoy the video linked above.
