What happens when you combine nearly 400 machining enthusiasts, a panel of YouTubers, and a few metal-working companies? You get the Saunders Machine Works/NYC CNC open house.

The Tormach mission is focused on enabling the ideas of our many users, who find themselves at varying levels of knowledge and skill when it comes to machining. CNC machining has often been restricted to those with the means to house massive manufacturing machinery and those with the knowledge-base to keep from crashing said machinery.

The number of customers that have Tormach machines has grown quite a bit over the years, and with customers, the community has expanded as well. Today, we’ve announced the list of our official Tormach Brand Ambassadors. Makers, machinists, entrepreneurs, roboticists, and so much more, these Tormach owners are exemplifying everything that Tormach machinery is capable of creating.

Many Tormach customers start out by designing and building homemade CNC devices. Whether they’re retrofitting a manual mill or piecing together components to make a lathe. This week, we stumbled onto a metal lathe made out of concrete on Instructables. In fact, one of our founders, Greg Jackson, had a thesis in college that focused on adding concrete to drill press columns and cataloging the rigidity changes. While concrete can provide some similar properties to casting – some commercial machines even use a polymer concrete cast frame – it can fall short in a number of ways. Concrete has a tendency to heat up during the mixing and pouring process, which leads to cooling and shrinking as the material dries.

Adding a finish to your parts isn’t always vital, but it is certainly one of the more entertaining parts of machining. For those who are looking for a finish that is arguably one of the most classic, engine turning will add a unique sheen to your parts.

As the world of manufacturing trends toward being smaller and more customized, many industries are doing the same. Customized jewelry has often been relegated to work done in castings, but customized jewelry is becoming a much bigger industry, and CNC machinery is helping to lead the way.