Travis has been building a new CNC machine to cut the aluminum faceplates. We have been contracting this part of production out, but we are bringing it in-house when this machine is finished.
The ShopBot that mills the wood bodies isn’t fit for this job because cutting metal requires a cooling bath. In this video you can see the coolant dousing the bit, along with the source of coolant at the bottom:

Unfortunately, this test run ended in a bit of disaster, as Travis described in his email:

“After making all the modifications to stiffen up the z-axis and install the re-circulating flood coolant system, our new machine made its first quality cutting today. I made about 1/3rd of the cutouts and then, disaster. To no fault of its own, the top z-axis mount came loose and buried the bit in the table.”
The “fault” was an attempt at making do with a cheap bearing mount. Nothing $15 won’t fix!
We are looking forward to that fix so we can start producing!
Sadly, this video doesn’t have the disaster in it. But it’s pretty cool anyway.
Here’s a pic of the failure:

Metal cutter goes awry.

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news by Peter