Wired has a micro-tour of a product design process in the multimedia section. Of note to me is that they significantly misrepresent the activity in one slide and slightly misrepresent it in the next.

In slide 7, Brad Niven is certainly not using a “Haas VF-2 CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine to fill a cavity.” He is using a glue gun. He is using a glue gun. It looks like a bigger glue gun than you buy in the craft store, so it probably cost $100, $150. Visible in the foreground are what you might call the “drill bits” that the machine uses to do the actual dirty work. Of course since this is a milling machine, it is not going to be drilling holes. It will be pulling the tooling (the “drill bit”) across some portion of the surface of the work, not drilling a straight hole.

You can see the machine at work in the next slide. Here it is slightly misleading to say that “Hass [sic] CNC milling machines run hot.” This would give the impression that the motor of the machine is hot itself, and needs to be cooled off. The further comments give a better idea of what is going on. The “drill bit” is spinning so fast that it is generating a lot of heat from friction as it cuts, even though it is quite sharp and hard. Anyone who has done any amount of handiwork knows that drill bits and screws get hot, but their speeds are quite pathetic compared to the RPM put out out by this machine.

If you don’t use an expensive “drill bit” (a mill, here), you simply can’t run the machine that fast. The “bit” will get too hot and loose its hardness or break altogether.

After seeing the nice shiny clean new Haas, it mollified my envy somewhat to see that Frog has to retrofit some old clunkers, too.