Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting (2015)
As somebody trying to get into mechanical engineering while living in a small urban apartment, this has been an incredible resource... not that I&#x27;ve made much progress along the lines it describes though.<p>It&#x27;s tough to plan a path toward growth in these skills without sustaining inordinate expenses at each step. I can&#x27;t afford to become afflicted with Gear Acquisition Syndrome. I&#x27;ve come close to dropping huge sums of cash on tools before discovering, at the last minute, critical reasons that they could not do what I need for the designs I have in mind. Maybe I&#x27;ll visit a makerspace? Ah, but every one in my area appears to have gone defunct since Covid year zero.<p>So the journey up to this point has been:<p>- A lot of reading: not just faffing around with hobbyist blogspam -- full-on MechE textbooks, learning what really goes into engineering schematic diagrams, all that good stuff<p>- Getting back up to speed with the pencil-on-paper geometry and math skills I&#x27;ve lost after years of doing all my intellectual work in digital form (at least I can still draw a freehand circle)<p>- Proto-proto-prototyping: just making some physical objects roughly of the same geometry as what I&#x27;ve designed -- whittling them out of wood, sculpting them out of polymer clay<p>- Hacking together janky tools: trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of Meccano-clone parts, trying to make a crappy mini lathe out of an electric drill, just to get a basic feel for what&#x27;s involved<p>- Apologizing to my wife for all this weird scary stuff in the corner of the apartment<p>I was a CS major. The only hands-on physical engineering I did in college was cooking a single-transistor chip in a freshman applied physics lab. Basically I feel like someone who has studied everything about the physics of bicycles but has never ridden one. I&#x27;m really struggling on how to proceed.