We welcomed our new PCNC 440 into the world last week, and then immediately hit the road to get to World Maker Faire in New York.
At Maker Faire, we were greeted with the usual entourage of amateur engineers, tinkerers, and inventors, but with two smaller machines that fit in the cramped (10’ x 10’) booth, jaws were dropping as chips were flying. We milled piles and piles of aluminum to make numerous Arduino enclosures for demonstration cuts, and passed them out to the eager crowd.
Maker Faire is full of people that know their way around various tools, but are often unfamiliar (or vaguely familiar) with CNC. That’s why the PCNC 440 fits into the Maker crowd so well – size, price, and usability are all less intimidating than other machines with the same capabilities. [youtube]Ziw_x8BMlHw[/youtube] Now that the pre-sales are open, the PCNC 440 is already in high demand. In fact, a makerspace in New Jersey, known as The Maker Depot, was one of the first to snag a forthcoming 440. Michael Franchino, one of the owners of The Maker Depot, said, “We have been looking at a CNC mill for a while. We have a manual mill in our shop, but it takes someone with a lot of skill to be able to utilize it. I had been looking at the 1100 or 770, but with a limited budget it was just out of our reach. When I saw the 440, it seemed to be a perfect fit in both size and price.”
While Franchino isn’t exactly sure what members will be doing with their new machine, “We are mentors for an FTC (FIRST Robotics) robotics team, and I am pretty sure we will have some uses for it to manufacture custom parts for the robot,” he explains. “We’re all very excited to be getting our machine soon!” Pre-order your PCNC 440 now to be one of the first to get your hands on new milling capabilities in a small space.