CNC Electronics
and Software
CNC Electronics
 CNC Mechanical

CNC Mechanical
 CNC Projects

CNC Projects
 Speaker Building

Speaker Building
 Banjo Building

Banjo Building
Guitar Building

Guitar Building

CNC Projects

Building an Air Powered Engine from Baltic Birch Plywood

I saw an air powered engine while surfing on Youtube the other day and decided to build one that can be cut entirely from a single piece of Baltic Birch plywood using a CNC router.  I designed and modeled this from scratch in Solidworks (so that I could post it without fear of copyright violations). Here are the Solidworks files for this design.

PCB Isolation Routing


Here is a business card sized PIC18F2550 breakout PCB that was etched on my newest machine. The board is copper clad with tin plating (using Liquid Tin) The layout was done with FreePCB and the isolation routing was done with CopperCAM

Fixture for CNC machining small parts

After trying several methods to fixture a banjo bridge blank (about .625" x 3") and having several of them come loose and fly off of the machine, I found that Sears has a small vise that is very well suited to holding parts and uses a cam-locking mechanism that allows for rapid setup.  I have been using sacrificial blocks on the jaws and routing a slot into them that is slightly (.025") smaller than the piece. 

Here is a video of the setup