Never heard of doing that, that’s clever.
@wileydavis- That is a gorgeous little part. How are you holding that down on the second operation? I’d love to get a little mill and do more stuff in metal.
I didn’t initially plan to do anything in house. I started up with essentially no money, and just bootstrapped it out of my garage. I couldn’t take the risk of buying equipment before knowing whether I had a viable business. But a couple years ago it got to the point where the amount I was spending on machining every year was enough to buy a used router. I’d rather buy one for myself than buy one for someone else every year. It helped that I’ve built little desktop CNC machines before, and have done some programming on racecar parts in the past, so the learning curve was minimal.
It’s so nice having all the G code in Solidworks and associative to the part, and not having to make 2D drawings for someone to reinterpret. The process is so fast now. We can literally go from a model in the morning to shipping in the afternoon.