FrontPage

Made from Scratch Wiki  

Front Page  

News

02/18/10:

due to massive spammage I have had to restore from backups and I'm locking the wiki; if you added something in 2009 and think it's important, please let me know by email. pukiwiki is old and I don't think there are any captcha solutions; I ought to migrate to dokuwiki or skdb, but that's a project in itself. -fenn

02/12/09:

This page is being superseded by the Societal Engineering Knowledge Database technology dissemination system:
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki//SKDB

2/18/07:

Things are coming along with the iskewb finally. I have the avr reading quadrature encoders and will be testing some code tonight. Nobody from gingery_machines has touched anything for several years now, and I'm thinking of reorganizing the wiki around my projects and processes, which has already happened to some extent.

4/12/06:

Well I'm running out of procrastination time before the CNC-workshop, so I've begun work on the hexapod in earnest. First up is the motor controller h-bridge so I'll be building the mechanics while waiting for electrical stuff to arrive in the mail.

This is a wiki, put together by members of the online metalworking community (especially folks at gingery_machines) in order to improve access to current information regarding building a machine shop from scratch. Information collected here should be relevant to non-professionals and small shops producing a variety of items on a prototype or short run basis.

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a dynamic web database that users can easily add to or modify. A wiki is different from a forum because users can modify the organizational structure of the site. Almost all wikis have an "Open editing" policy; any user can modify any page at any time.

*Why a wiki?  

• You can find the information you are looking for, unlike digging through mailing list archives
• You don't have to ask for anyone's permission to contribute. Just click on "edit this page". (log in as "anonymous" with password "password")
• You don't have to register. (hopefully it will stay this way)
• You don't have to do all the dirty hard behind the scenes work if you just want to contribute.
• You can do the dirty hard behind the scenes work if you want to.
• You don't have to worry about format compatibility i.e. I cant write .doc or .pdf files
• Wiki format is much easier to edit than HTML

Now that you know what you're looking at, a good place to start would be here.

If you can't figure out how to edit a page, just email me (fenn) and I'll put it up for you.

If you contribute a section of text that is your own idea, please sign your name to it. If it was someone else's idea, please put a link to the webpage it came from or the author's name, and update the list of authors. If it is common knowledge (i.e. how to sharpen a drill bit) then you don't need to include anyone's name. Most of all, don't worry about it too much; this isn't English class after all!

This site is designed to simplify access to information. If there is a site with good ideas/info on it, but it's buried under lots of junk (yahoogroups and rcm for example) you should ask the relevant author for permission, and then summarize it here, with enough detail that anyone else could replicate it. Please don't bury us under a pile of links! It forces the reader to go through every link and read the same information over and over again. There are plenty of webpages about that already.

The Vision  

Each machine in the series and also ones not in the series will have its own dedicated page. That page will point to sub-categories for that machine, such as a partslist, corrections, modifications. Looking at the parts list page, each part should have its own page. I think that should be fine-grained enough to start with. Someone can add a photo and/or CAD drawing of each part or assembly to that part's page. It would be nice to have a list of every little thing on the partslist page, like a bill of materials, and also links pointing to pages for each sub assembly. Carriage should point to saddle, apron, cross slide, and compound slide. Then, the compound slide page could also point to modifications of the compound slide under the modifications subsection.

I have to say this page has become much more gingery-focused than I had originally intended. I'd like to see some work on developing new designs as well. Anyone who is interested in helping design new machines should add ideas to the WishList for things I would like to see in an updated version of Dave_Gingery's book series.

intellectual property and copyright concerns page here.