FreeCAD News

It’s a giv­en that the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty is awe­some and make amaz­ing things. Every now and again though a project real­ly stops us in our tracks. None more so than this, the SL-24, an open source record lathe.

Part CNC and part high end DIY record deck this project allows peo­ple to exper­i­ment with cut­ting grooves to cre­ate their own records. Whilst more com­plex than home tap­ing or dig­i­tal copy­ing, vinyl has a spe­cial place in audio­philes hearts, why shouldn’t we cre­ate our own?!

The base of the unit is formed from ply­wood as is part of the gantry sys­tem, the main turntable is made with weight and rigid­i­ty by cast­ing con­crete. It’s a 3 axis machine and apart from the con­crete cast rotary axis the cut­ting head has 2 lin­ear axis for left and right and ver­ti­cal motion. As well as laser cut­ting and cast­ing there is some 3D print, a good exam­ple being 3D print­ed dampers to reduce and iso­late motor induced vibra­tions and also exter­nal vibra­tions, all of which could impact the audio qual­i­ty of a recording.

This long run­ning project has been mod­elled in FreeCAD, the project began before FreeCAD ver­sion 1.0 and there­fore doesn’t use the Assem­bly work­bench. In fact the com­plex machine is bro­ken into numer­ous CAD sub assem­blies and often these are just project files with numer­ous bodies/parts man­u­al­ly placed. 

The source for this project can be found linked over on the project Source­hut page. Includ­ed in the source is a PCB design in KiCad for a small motor con­trol board using a STM32 board and there is an Arduino sketch pro­vid­ed as a small pro­gram to run the lathe. There’s also some tools and util­i­ties for apply­ing EQ to your recordings.

Final­ly, check out https://pawb.fun/@slyka on the fedi­verse, where they often post updates about this fab­u­lous project.