cnc shaper

Hey, I don't know if this helps anyone but when I saw this I thought of this thread.

This is a video from youtube of How It's Made, sharpening steels.

Watch closely around 0:56, there's a shaper adding the tiny grooves to the steels. Looks like it might have some kind of power feed options. It has air lines all over it anyway. A curiosity at least.

 
So that mechanism isn't really all that great but I think I did come up with a decent idea. Since the castings are hard to come by laser cut steel may be a good way to get a small machine going fairly quickly. Anyone have experience building a machine around laser cut parts? SendCutSend seems to have good prices and they can cut up to 5/8 steel. I'm not sure how much the shipping would be though.
 
I've had water jet parts made on a local CNC water jet and that worked very well for me.
 
I had some metal cut for a furniture project at a place about 100 miles from me. Cut quality was excellent and they only use P&O (pickled and oiled) steel, so you don't have to worry about trying to clean off the mill scale to weld and paint. It cost about somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times what the metal for the project would have cost, and that would have been plain, not P&O steel. If you have a small job, the online places might be better, I think the minimum charge for the place I took mine to was $150, so only good for larger projects. If you do have a larger project, I would search nearby as the shipping costs will eat you up, local will likely beat it.
 
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