I dunno, in 27 37 years I'll be 69. And I've still got 2 years of uni left to go :((

I can make a paper airplane.

To be honest I spent almost 20 years on the factory floor. I moved into the engineering department at 37 and graduated with a 2:1 Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering at 42 (all payed for by the company). I did the degree on day release so it took 5 years.

So you could say I got here in 16 years.

Good work! Gives me encouragement to stick at it.

I finally got to do some welding! I'm pretty terrible at it, but I've seen worse. But now I have a frame to build my cnc on!

Blimey. That makes you nearly as old as me

Kos is definitely one of the people on here who I always think is younger than he actually is.

I'm 32. Still haven't matured (dance)

And still useless at maths. Or was that a typo?

This thread reminds me that I need to grab some spares for my MIG. It's been years since I've welded, but I was doing okay at the time.

There's definitely a typo in one of the messages. Unless time is measured differently in Scottish

/you/ are pulling me up on a typo? Oh the irony.

Hahaha. Fair point. I think I'm doing better recently.

Got my stepper motors today. Don't have the proper drivers yet so only running them at 750mA (instead of 4.5A) but even at that piddly current I can't stall them by hand. Well impressed.


CNC4You Nema 23 3.1Nm stepper motors: http://youtu.be/4ZhwKfWf3iY

The stepper motors are for controlling the movements along the axes?

Have you bought a router for it yet?

Yup, steppers for x, y and z axis. Would have made more sense to get a smaller one for the z, but the three were together in bundle for a nice price.

The cutting head is going to be kind of modular. Probably start with one of my face dremels and upgrade as I learn more about how to use it. I'd love one of those 3kW water cooled spindles on aliexpress. Or a plasma cutter!

Sounds promising.

I have been modelling on NX for most of the day, designing a bracket for our new force monitoring equipment.

I have no idea what a face dremel, but it sounds painful.

NX scares me. We have to use its little brother, Solid Edge, at uni and that's frustrating enough. Especially as they never actually teach us properly, so you end up having to work stuff out by yourself and invariably this leads to learning to do things the wrong way, or leaving big gaps in your knowledge.

I am teaching NX8.5 to our engineers next week. Having proper training makes huge difference.