Beginners' Source of Materials

I have been wanting to experiment with my Shopbot Desktop more than I have; but I don't want to rip through hundreds of dollars worth of wood while practicing. I have found a fairly cheap source of wood for playing around and not worrying about the cost of the materials. At my local Home Depot, they have a fence board that is roughly 3/4" x 5.5" x 5' or so. It is a bit rough as in not smooth and when you go through the stack you have to be a little choosy. Here, they are $1.64 per board. There are knots but also two foot plus sections that are clear. I used one for my second cut and it worked out pretty well. I used my Dewalt surface planer and joiner to clear up the edges a bit and my chop saw to cut a bit to length. I cut it to the length of the MDF and used some home-made clamps to pinch it to the MDF on either end. All-in-all, a pretty pleasant experience.

For my home-made clamps, I cut (with other shop tools) a small scrap of 2x4 into two parts roughly pistol-shaped. Then I drilled a 3/8" hole vertically about where the trigger would be. I used some 4" x 5/16" coarse screws into one of the supplied special nuts for sliding into the aluminum base. This first try was only OK; but it was good enough for this run. I want to experiment with it a little more including a step-by-step means to make the clamps from a freshly arrived desktop without having to drive screws into the supplied MDF.

More to come...

We use the pink foam insulation you can get at Home Depot to do test cuts cheap and is very forgiving

Go to a local cabinet shop and let them know that you are a hobbiest woodworker and alot of them will sell you materials cheeper than the big box store , Or try local builders supply stores NOT big box stores

I'm with you on the pink foam Jerry. We were scared stiff of small cutters breaking off and killing us! Good old Ken put us onto foam and we learnt 3D in under a day and got terrific confidence. Genes cabinet shop suggestion is also good. Our local guy offered us any amount of blackwood offcuts by the trailer load for free. Sadly we then found out how dangerous this stuff is so stopped using it. Chazz you will possibly find your biggest cost feeding your Shopbot is tooling and I reckon we have all learnt from Brady that it is down right daft to even think about buying el-cheapo cutters. You can get a kilometre out of end mills once you learn the sweet spot for your machine.

If you have a Habitat for Humanity resale shop around they usually have all kinds of scrap materials around,

wood, laminate counters, Corian

Hello Chazz,

I am in Columbia, MD. If you would like to have some Corian to experiment on, let me know. I can give you some cut off's to play around with...

Charles