Very out of left field, but how does one start doing these kind of things?
My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things.
And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned skills would probably not transfer very well into the next adventure. Additionally, I imagine the machine used in the video is fairly expensive and not worth purchasing for one experiment.
I'm asking this because I find these kind of builds fascinating, but I'm always humbled about my skills when I think about the transition from digital to material.
YouTube videos are one of the best ways to learn mechanical/material skills. Just start. You'll suck at first. Keep at it and eventually you'll suck a little less. One day you'll be mediocre. And if you keep at it you'll be skilled.
Can confirm. For general knowledge I recommend two fantastic channels: (1) Click Spring (2) Matthias Wandel. They're always doing interesting things and usually some technique comes up in the videos that I didn't know of. There are probably countless others.
Youtube really shines in this because there is much to see happening. Much of the information is visual and mechanical on how to do things well (or at all).
You generally need lots of tools to build stuff though (you can sometimes trade time for tool cost), but these days finding an equivalent to a maker space or hacker space shouldn't be too difficult.
* ClickSpring's clock series is one of my favorite video series ever.
Wandel is a little unconventional that he builds many of his own tools, but I find he's quite practical and insightful in doing things.
My background is in CS and math, and I could have come up with and built everything up to exporting the mesh into triangles, but would have needed months of google searching and trial and error to do the actual "machining" part of things.
And then even if I went through the painful process of learning it on the job for this task, the learned skills would probably not transfer very well into the next adventure. Additionally, I imagine the machine used in the video is fairly expensive and not worth purchasing for one experiment.
I'm asking this because I find these kind of builds fascinating, but I'm always humbled about my skills when I think about the transition from digital to material.