Until about a month ago we used to have to go to a local waterjet company to have the face plates of the Ohm cut. We have been talking for a while about brining most if not all of our manufacturing in-house, but getting our own water jet just to cut faceplates didn’t seem to make sense. We already have one CNC machine to mill wood, plastics, and soft materials, and another to assemble printed circuit boards, but really had no way to cut metal. We talked last year about cutting metal with our wood cnc machine, but that would tie it up because metal takes a long time to mill using drill bits. It would also require a coolant system, so the moisture would not play well with our wood work. Travis came up with a solution and built us our very own metal milling CNC machine that we call “Metal Bot”.

Since we plan on cutting metals only on this machine it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to cut each piece. We are currently cutting the faceplates of the Ohm64 using aluminum in about 30 minutes. There is a nice timelapse of a faceplate being cut that can be viewed here. When we finally tweaked our machine to create very accurate cuts, I shot some video of Travis explaining how it works. In this video you can see the very first faceplate being cut for our prototypes, and Travis talking about it.

Since this video was shot we built Metal Bot her very own room, and I will shoot some production video of the production faceplates being milled.

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news by Jay