Walter Sorrells is a professional bladesmith and a YouTube knife maker. His channel focuses on teaching the processes of making knives and exposing the world to everything that is involved in the knife making process. Sorrells recently bought a PCNC 770 to help him produce and standardize his line of Tactix Armory knives.

Experiential education started to emerge in the 1980s, but it seems like technical education teachers knew this long before all the research was published. Keeping content fresh and finding projects students are interested in is a hurdle that seems to get consistently harder to overcome. Tormach just released its project library to help you do just that.

Whether you’re a CNC veteran or you just discovered this amazing tool, everybody has had to start somewhere. I’ve talked to a number of Tormach customers, and the stories vary widely.

Toolpaths are the heart of computer aided manufacturing (CAM), and by association, incredibly important to CNC machining. But, toolpaths are more than just the pattern tools make to cut your parts.

Manual machining has been around since two-man lathes in 1300 BCE. While the history of milling machines is a little foggy, some historians credit the first motorized milling machine to Eli Whitney, while others claim other inventors like Captain John H. Hall of the Harpers Ferry Armory, Simeon North, Roswell Lee, Robert Johnson, and Thomas Blanchard.

Autodesk is a company that creates all kinds of software for manufacturing, engineering, and enterprise uses. When the company took to creating Fusion 360, an approachable, integrated CAD/CAM package, we knew that Tormach needed to be involved. Fusion 360 provides the ability to easily move from CAD (computer aided design) to CAM (computer aided manufacturing), which really streamlines the process to creating parts.