CNC Overview: What is a CNC Machine & How is it Used?

Bench-top CNCs like I've got here in my shop have really become the rage these days. And what that does is it raises a lot of questions about what's the deal with the bench-top CNCs. So in this particular video what I wanna do is just give you an overview of what these machines can bring to your shop if you're interested in going that route. Then, in additional videos that we've created, we've drilled down in detail with each machine to look at layout, mounting the material on the machine, much more in depth about specifically setting up work and using the machine. But let's talk about this whole CNC thing.

What's the deal with CNC? Well, first, what is the deal with CNC? Computer Numerical Control is what that means. Here's what it boils down to. We're gonna connect a computer to the head of the machine.

The computer is gonna control the movement of that machine. So think about it this way. This machine becomes you with a plunge router in your hand, the plunge is what we call the Z-axis up and down, move this way, that's Y-axis moving away from you, left to right Is the X-axis. So as the computer feeds a signal to the machine it can move in each of those directions and it can move in all those directions at the same time to create a variety of shapes a variety of profiles, do a variety of work. Now, what are we connecting to?

Well, it's pretty familiar stuff. The machines have a router or spindle mounted in them. And when you look at those you're gonna be very familiar with it. It's very much like a router motor and a handheld router or a router table that you've probably already used. On the end of the spindle, there's a collet, and into that collet we can put different router bits to create different cuts.

The way that the machines work is that, as the computer feeds the signal, the X and the Y axis and the Z axis are gonna be controlled. So you'll see this component on the machine moving back and forth, left to right, front to back, the spindle, moving up and down, to create all the different cuts that we wanna create. The material itself is gonna be mounted to what's called a spoil board called a spoil board because it's like having a sacrificial fence on one of your tools. The spoil board is something that we're gonna cut into because quite commonly we're gonna cut all the way through our work. And as a result, every once in a while we're gonna come back and clean that spoil board up.

So in the world of jargon to understand, that's commonly called fly cutting. When we come back and we level this board to get it nice and flat and get those marks off of it. What kind of stuff can we do with these machines? Well, honestly, your imagination can take you in a bunch of different directions. People have made guitars.

They've done what looked like hand carved items. Projects that can be done with CNC machines are very very broad, very, very endless. How about different materials, well we're gonna look at cutting wood, we're gonna look at cutting MDF but, we can go quite a ways beyond that. You can cut a lot of non-ferrous materials like aluminum. You can also cut plastics, foam, polycarbonate, acrylic.

So you wanna make sure that you understand from your particular manufacturer, what is, and is not safe to put on your machine but, like a router, we can control the speed on the spindle, the RPM and we can control the feed rate at which it travels. All of that stuff will come into play when we're cutting especially non-ferrous metals and materials besides wood. So quite a bit of diversity in these machines a lot to learn, but we're gonna help you with that learning curve. As I said, there's other videos coming from us that are gonna drill down in detail and try to help you understand better, exactly what these machines can do for you.