To Start: Basics and What You Should Know

If you have reached this site and you are still reading, you are either very excited and can't wait to get started, or you are supremely confused and wondering what is this CNC thing. To slow the enthusiastic readers, I will explain this in layman terms (a more technical and historical perspective can be found here on wikipedia.org). Another word of caution, our CNC will not look like the one on Wikipedia. That's the expensive sort. CNC is Computer Numerical Control but that is gibberish. It does hint you to the fact that something is controlled, and probably by a computer. Well, that's my interpretation. It's really a mechanism that interfaces to a computer to control its movements, similar to a robot, but this machine has a specific function. It cuts or shapes things with this control. In essence, a computer precisely controls a cutting tool, like a router for instance, to cut materials such as wood, plastic or metals into shapes only bounded by your imagination. We will get into more depth later regarding some of the knowledge you may need to actually cut some of these materials, but that's it in a nutshell.