FreeCAD News

In an amus­ing twist, this Forged in FreeCAD sto­ry will con­tain sim­i­lar words to the last Forged In FreeCAD sto­ry, most notably, “con­crete” and “lathe”!The last “Forged in FreeCAD” sto­ry was the SL-24 Open­source Record Lathe, and indeed this sto­ry is a lathe sto­ry that includes con­crete in the construction. 

The Mod­u­lathe has a cou­ple of design ver­sion with V2 being a pret­ty ful­ly fea­tured desk­top met­al cut­ting lathe. The Mod­u­lathe V2 can be built for man­u­al oper­a­tion but is also CNC ready.

For a lathe to be able to machine met­als, rigid­i­ty is key. Many com­mer­cial lath­es have large sec­tions made in cast iron which add weight and rigid­i­ty, but it can be tricky to have a cast iron capa­ble fur­nace at home! The Mod­u­lathe V2 uses cast con­crete to cre­ate large heavy sec­tions of the design and these are quite eas­i­ly cast into 3D print­ed mould­ing designed in FreeCAD. 

The ear­li­er V1 design (source still avail­able) was large­ly 3D print­ed, with 3D print­ed sec­tions being filled with small grain self com­pact­ing con­crete. This was achieved by the clever use of Gyroid infill, which has a use­ful prop­er­ty in that it doesn’t cre­ate closed sec­tions with­in the body of a 3D print. The new ver­sion has less 3D print in the actu­al tool, but uses a lot of 3D print for the moulds with large sec­tions of the design being direct­ly cast with concrete.

Added to the con­crete con­struc­tion are off the shelf lin­ear rail sys­tems as well as off the shelf lathe and spin­dle com­po­nents. It’s a great com­bi­na­tion of decent parts and local home pro­duc­tion. It’s not a huge­ly cheap build but cost for cost you will end up with a more capa­ble lathe for the price point than if you bought off the shelf. Even if build­ing a lathe isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly of inter­est, it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing project and well worth down­load­ing the source files to take a look at the excel­lent FreeCAD work!