Homemade house numbers - or, is a CNC machine worth it?
Around the time I started to get into woodworking, I bought a Shapeoko2 CNC machine during their crowdfunding campaign. I had mostly planned to use it for electronics projects, milling single layer circuit boards and making simple enclosures. My in-laws then asked for larger than normal house numbers as a holiday gift. They lived in a retirement community the time and claimed the house numbers were too hard to read from a distance. I took this as a good opportunity to learn how to use the machine and required software, I could mill them out of MDF and then give them a good coat of an acrylic spraypaint to seal them against the weather.
It might have been one of a few CNC projects I completed, I can't actually think of the others. For a number of reason, I sold the machine and bought a bunch of more traditional woodworking equipment instead. Since lots of people have compared CNC versus traditional woodworking techniques, I won't try to recap all the differences here. A quick search on YouTube will yield lots of videos.
Ultimately, the thing that made me sell the machine was the software. At the time I was using Linux on all my home computers, and the CNC ecosystem for Linux wasn't great. LibreCAD is a decent CAD package for two dimensional work, and did a good job for design work. The Shapeoko's GRBL controller, paired with Universal G-code Sender software worked well for controlling the machine. The challenge I had was finding a good Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software to convert the 2D CAD drawings to the G-code that tells the what to do. With good reason, this is a challenging bit of software to develop - there are a lot of (literal) moving parts. Unfortunately, sticking to the Linux environment, the available options were all pretty sub-par.
So, I've kind of decided to keep computer's out of my shop. I'd like to learn techniques (both with power and hand tools) that let me use my brain and my hands to build something. I spend a lot of my work day in front of a computer screen, and I didn't want to add yet another hobby that kept me sitting in front of a glowing rectangle. And the original goal of milling circuit boards - someday I want to learn some of the old-school homebrew techniques for building circuits (like Manhattan or dead-bug style construction).
As a result, I bought a scroll saw - it's one of several tools that, depending on the size and material) replaced my need for a CNC machine. It wasn't a great purchase, but I did a few projects with it. It's a lot faster to print out my design, tack it onto a board, and cut out than it would take me to go through using a buggy piece of CAM software and upload it to the machine. I ended up doing another set of house numbers using the scroll saw, and I think they came out just as nice as the CNC product would be. Of course, I ending up getting rid of the scroll saw, but if I had to do this project again, I would pick up another cheap one over trying to find someone with a CNC machine.
