EE Bookshelf: The Guerilla Guide to CNC Machining

The always knowledgeable Chris Gammell (of The Amp Hour fame) pointed me to one of the best CNC and mold making resources I’ve ever seen online, and while this may be old news to some people there’s an incredible collection of advice holed up in this article book: The Guerilla Guide to CNC Machining, Mold Making and Resin Casting by Michal Zalewski.  If you’ve ever wondered how you can use a CNC mill to make custom gears, or just what the limits of a CNC mill are, this is probably the best online resource you’re likely to come across (note: feel free to prove me wrong in the comments below!).

I’ve been on the fence for years between buying a mid-range 3D printer or a mid-range CNC mill.  They’re different solutions to (in my case) similar problems, but their respective advantages and disadvantages come close to cancelling each other out, which is why I still haven’t taken the plunge on either.  My only interest is create prototypes of enclosures, or small mechanical parts like gears, and molds for silicon keypads or resin prototype parts, etc.  A CNC mill is more flexible since a mid-range mill can also cut soft metals, and has a better finish than many affordable 3D printers, but you’re also more limited with the shape of the interior area compared to 3D printing.

If anyone out there has anything to contribute on the debate (in my head) between 3D printers and CNC mills, my guess is I’m not the only ‘maker’ in this same boat … where finish quality and price are important and it’s probably not realistic to just ‘buy both’.  Feel free to chime in below with your own thoughts and experience!


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Join Adafruit on Mastodon

Adafruit is on Mastodon, join in! adafruit.com/mastodon

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


Maker Business — “Packaging” chips in the US

Wearables — Enclosures help fight body humidity in costumes

Electronics — Transformers: More than meets the eye!

Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Silicon Labs introduces CircuitPython support, and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Guardian Robot, Weather-wise Umbrella Stand, and more!

Microsoft MakeCode — MakeCode Thank You!

EYE on NPI — Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — #NewProds 7/19/23 Feat. Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 CircuitPython Powered Internet Display!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



8 Comments

  1. It’s not just the CNC information that’s interesting here. There’s a bunch of useful information about robot-building — gear assemblages and stability items — in section 6.

    Michael Zalewski is one of those people who are way too productive for their own good; puts the rest of us to shame. His robot building photosets on Flickr are a good browse (and his web security book is one of the gold standards these days).

  2. Thanks for the book link Kevin. I will check it out. I too have been dithering between a CNC mill or router and a 3D printer.

    Some of the latest generation extrusion machines shown at Maker Faire this fall were beginning to approach ‘acceptable’ finish quality – although still a far cry from what you can get from a mill.

    Other advantages of a mill include a larger work envelope and the variety of materials (including wood & soft metals). The deal-breaker at this point is finding the shop-space for such a mill. I’d have to sell off some other machinery to make room.

  3. Thanks for the shout out, but I actually found it over at http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups. Highly recommended subreddit (along with http://reddit.com/r/theamphour, of course!).

  4. One other comment: the reason I’m favoring the CNC milling approach over a 3D printer (which I’d love to have as well, but I only have so much dough): I can route a PCB with a CNC milling machine. There are plugins to take gerbers to gcode, so milling copper clad is a real possibility.

  5. Definitely go for the mill first. It is more useful than a 3d printer. You can make high quality gears of any size on a mill and can cut your enclosures even if it isn’t CNC. If it is a CNC machine then you can do nice rounded corners and fancy features that would be hard or impossible if it were manual. You also aren’t limited to a small set of plastics.

  6. I sell Taig (CNC) mills as one of my “day” jobs. CNC is far more versatile than 3D printing, at least on a hobby level. The problem is that there is a larger barrier to entry, as with 3D printing you just need to learn CAD and learn to use & adjust your 3D printer. With CNC you need to learn CAD, CAM, use and adjust the machine, as well as general machining techniques, jig&fixture work, precison measurement, etc. This is a good thing as once you start to master those skills there is very little that you can’t fabricate. I dont want to denigrate 3D printing as it is a useful technique, and becoming more versatile as time goes on, but I’m glad I went down the road of learning machining. Machined my first PCBs this week (I’m not just a dealer, I’m a user).

  7. CNC Mill, all the way! I’m extremely happy with mine:

    http://zarthcode.com/zarthmill-my-sieg-sx2-based-cnc-mini-mill/

    I’ve upgraded it to have 4 axes, a 3D probing tool, and other things.

    One of the things I’ve hoped to work on is a 3D printing toolhead that I can mount on my mill. The idea is to be able to build parts that are metal *and* plastic (using the 4th axis)….Or I can just put a build table on the machine, and have as much build area for traditional 3d printing as I want.

  8. Another difference between the two platforms is tolerances. On a CNC mill you can get much tighter tolerances, so if you have tolerance requirements then I would say the CNC mill is the way to go. If you con’t care too much about tolerances and just want to prototype a part easier then 3d printing is the path to take. The thing with CNC mills (or regular mills for that matter) is the setup.

    My father was a machinist and he would spend days setting up the jig necessary to make the parts he needed, both with numerical controlled and manual controlled mills. He told me that the hardest part of the job was reading the blueprints and picturing the necessary jig(s) to make the part.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.