This workstation has a number of hand tools, power tools, and soldering tools that are kept behind locked doors in the Woodworking Room. In order to use any of these tools, however, each student must have gone through a brief safety session and have a signed waiver on file.
Below is a picture of various stations in our Workshop. We have a woodworking area with hand and power tools used to shape wood and other materials. We have a CNC machine able to carve precise cuts out of various materials using various methods. There is also a soldering station for electrical components or anything else you might need to hard-wire together.
In lieu of a tutorial, I will point out various helpful online resources to get acquainted with this rooms' varied equipment and capabilities. The types of projects that can be obtained from within this room cannot be given in a couple of tutorials but from resources such as the Innovation Lab Manager and researching similar projects to your own.
For the Axiom Pro AR6 CNC machine, we have the ability to cut into various materials in order to sculpt an object. To understand what kind of objects it can produce I will describe some of the major features and how they relate to project constraints.
First, the cutting area is 24"W x 36"L x 6"H. This allows for some rather large projects. Most materials do not reach this 6" height but if a project does include a dimension of this height, certain bits and cuts will have to be evaluated as the gantry does not allow for some cut depths with a material this high.
Second, it can handle one sided, two sided and 4 axis carving. One sided carving is the most common and involves cutting from only one side of the material (top). Two sided is a process to achieve a 3 dimensional object from cutting one side of the material first and then turning over the material to perform the second cut and completely cut out an object from the material. Lastly, a 4 axis carving involves the use of a rotary axis that will turn a block of material (3.14" max diameter) and rotate the material while the gantry performs general X,Y,Z axis movements to perform cuts that can be more detailed than two sided projects. The size of the material that fits into this Rotary Axis tool does create limitation on the kinds of projects it can perform.
Third, the types of materials it can cut also have its limitations. This occurs mostly with metals. For instance, Aluminum 6061 is a commonly suggested metal to be CNC'd and is an ideal metal choice for this particular machine. This machine should not be used for materials that would require flood coolant bed or lubricant. This would describe a host of other metals that can be CNC'd based on other heavier duty, well suited CNC machines that have coolant/lubricant accessories.
And lastly, the spindle for the cutting bit has speeds that can vary from 0 - 24,000 RPM. This might not be a dealbreaker for many projects as this is a good range of speed for most projects. But it is a constraint that I feel should be mentioned. Along these lines, the "0" (zero) speed does allow for the use of a dragknife. This can be useful in cutting some flat materials and turn the CNC into a very large Cricut Cutting machine. The detail of the cuts cannot be achieved as well as the Cricut cutter but are still within a 1/16th of an inch in tight corners.
