
MatchSticks: Portable CNC System for Automating Wood-Working Joinery - ArtWomb
https://rutian.github.io/projects/MS/
======
Animats
The paper [1] is more useful than the web site. A key point:

 _Rather than clamping workpieces into the CNC machine, the machine is
designed to be clamped onto the workpiece. It is portable and battery powered
to provide freedom of movement._

That's the real innovation here. This is a little machine which works on the
ends of large pieces of lumber. That's convenient. It's hard to work on the
ends of long pieces with a ShopBot, which is a vertical spindle machine.

This little machine could be very useful for wooden boat builders, who use
tension joints.

There's only the one prototype unit, apparently. It's not a product.

Here are some dovetails being cut on a more standard CNC router.[2]

[1]
[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3173574.3173723](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3173574.3173723)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDa4dQnnEyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDa4dQnnEyg)

~~~
jasode
_> This is a little machine which works on the ends of large pieces of lumber.
That's convenient. It's hard to work on the ends of long pieces with a
ShopBot, which is a vertical spindle machine._

A similar theme of _" bring a small machine to the wood material instead of
the wood to the large machine"_ is the handheld portable CNC (e.g. Shaper[1])
instead of laying the wood on a large 4'x8' or 5'x10' bed underneath a
gantry[2].

(I've only seen demos of Shaper so can't comment on the viability of a
computer guiding imperfect human motor skills. It seems obvious a CNC on a
precision gantry would be more ultra-precise.)

[1] [https://www.shapertools.com/](https://www.shapertools.com/)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=cnc+router+gantry+bed&source...](https://www.google.com/search?q=cnc+router+gantry+bed&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

~~~
DannyBee
Shaper, while nice for some things, is definitely unusable for joinery for
precision reasons

~~~
otherwiseguy
Really?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s)

~~~
DannyBee
Err, yes.

The very video shows plenty of joinery error that would not be acceptable in
any real setting outside of a hobby. I'll do my best to break it down for you.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s&t=1m35s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s&t=1m35s)

and

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s&t=1m38s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1heXNiwAB0s&t=1m38s)

Note the significant tearout there, and the ill-fitting of a number of hearts
(despite it being cut oversize).

Note also the significant gaps between top and side due to not being able to
cut the flat bottom consistently (vibration/rigidity most likely)

Ditto visible here:
[https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=96](https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=96)

and

[https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=100](https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=100)

here.

You can also see the side-to-side fit from the heart joinery has significant
gaps for the same reason (they avoid showing in most shots, and blur the shot
where they are spinning it, admittedly unclear if that's intentional).

[https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=125](https://youtu.be/1heXNiwAB0s?t=125)

here.

That is why the edge is wavy.

Sorry, but none of this would be acceptable for real fine furniture joinery,
etc.

Does this mean it's impossible to use a shaper to do it? I'm sure if you are
super careful you could probably do somewhat better, but i don't think you'll
solve the fundamental issues (or make it repeatably solved)

Look - i own one, i was an early backer, i've used it extensively. I think
it's a great tool for what it is.

But i don't think there's a good reason to pretend it's a miracle tool that
can do things it can't.

Pretending otherwise will just make for unhappy people.

One reason Domino has been so successful for festool is that it's easy, it is
great at what it is (invisible, simple, loose tenon joinery), etc.

Shaper should be viewed the same - it will be plenty successful for what it is
good at.

But joinery is not that thing.

------
kchhina
Another interesting open source community driven project is Maslow CNC router
[0]. I bought one recently although I haven't assembled it yet. It works on
cutting large 8x4 boards. Another tabletop router CNC robot [1] is coming to
market soon.

All this innovation in these inexpensive CNC tooling excites me as it enables
a garage tinkerer to play with woodworking projects.

Edit: I am not affiliated to either of these companies

[0] [https://www.maslowcnc.com/](https://www.maslowcnc.com/) [1]
[http://www.goliathcnc.com/](http://www.goliathcnc.com/)

------
pp19dd
For those who haven't done any woodworking, CNC'ing or 3D printing before,
this video will give you a good perspective on operational details. Take a
look at this video of a bandsaw vs a CNC:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHfEVek7-r4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHfEVek7-r4)

These two people don't hide any details, they expose you to how complicated
these systems are, each parameter, each step and then show you man vs machine.
Note the vacuum cleaner at 6 minutes. The CNC took 6 and a half minutes to cut
the gear, the man took 8.

~~~
jimnotgym
A couple of interesting points stem from this. (I served a 3 year
apprenticeship as a carpenter while I was studying...long story..in all I did
nearly 10 years!)

1) The vacuum cleaner. Routers turn wood to horrible fine dust. Bandsaws turn
everything to bigger dust particles, and take a much narrower 'kerf' than a
router bit, which must be thick enough to not flex too much and to leave room
to clear the dust. Other traditional machinery like hollow-chisel morticers
and planers tend to produce large chips. I hated working all day with a router
for the feeling of duct in my skin and hair. I wore a mask, and had extraction
and had an air filter...

2) Bandsaws pull down through the surface, which makes the top surface look
neat, with no tearing. With a router, cutting direction is critical to this.
Twisted bits can help

3) Sharpness. Router bits suck for staying sharp, especially in plywood. We
would have multiples of every size so they could be sent away for sharpening.
Dovetail bits (and others) are wear critical, as they wear they need re-
adjusting. If a router bit is placed in a situation where it gets hot it will
be ruined very quickly. Bandsaw blades are in contrast pretty cheap and long
lasting.

4) The situation was comparible if you wanted one gear ever. If you wanted
100, I reckon the bandsaw with a clever jig could cut those in around half the
time.

5) Bandsaws are quiet, low vibration and safe (because they naturally pull the
work-piece toward the table and the guides serve as guards). Routers are loud
little banshees (especially the big 1/2" industrial ones), throw dangerous
particles as your eyes, if hand guided can snatch even when used with a jig
(especially the big ones).

I only do hobby woodwork now, and tend to find tasks that don't need the
router to come out of storage!

~~~
monochromatic
I have a healthy respect for any tool, but routers scare the shit out of me in
a way that even a table saw doesn’t.

~~~
jimnotgym
I don't blame you. I have hit embedded stones in chipboard and had pieces of
TCT hit my goggles. I have had a collet work loose and the bit come out. I
have had them fight back on too many occasions.

I once purchased a 2" wide flat cutter designed for cutting wide tennons. Even
run at the correct speed it was jumpy as hell. The whole router would jump out
of the work piece! You had to take tiny cuts. After doing a small number of
tennons it was blunt! Waste of money. If you want to do woodwork as a hobby,
get a set of chisels and a tennon saw... and enjoy yourself

------
DannyBee
Horizontal routers like this are neat. Wood is more forgiving than most
materials, but the traditional problem in bringing things to workpiece is
still the same - rigidity.

While it doesn't matter quite as much for edge treatment that gets sanded, it
matters a lot for joinery - the difference between a perfect fit and a very
loose not working joint is 0.005 inches.

(For a real cnc, that would be a very very crappy tolerance).

The easiest way to maintain these is making very rigid machines, and the
easiest way to do that is adding weight.

This is why my wood gantry router weighs 1800+ lbs, and that is very light.

I have a horizontal aggregate that can already do exactly what this thing
does.

For teaching people though, or for messing around as a hobby, I think things
like this are fun.

------
mauvehaus
As it happens, I left software a year and a half ago to pursue and education
(and hopefully soon a career) in woodworking. My feelings on this are mixed.

Let's be clear right off the bat: this is not a production machine, and
probably won't get any significant traction in the professional market. I
checked out a local architectural millwork shop last year that does high end
doors and windows. Once their rough lumber is milled 4-square, everything, and
I mean _everything_ gets cut on their 5 axis CNC router. Which has a roughly
8' x 24' bed. Cabinet shops that make a lot of drawers but aren't invested in
CNC get a lot of mileage out of router jigs that cut pretty much foolproof
dovetails once they're set the first time.

So that leaves the hobbyists and truly custom folks. The truly custom folks
are probably already jigged up to cut their joinery with a router, a Festool
Domino, or other dedicated machines (mortisers, tenoners, cope and stick set-
ups for a router or shaper, etc).

At the very high end, or for one-offs, hand-cut joinery is either expected by
the client, or still competitive with building jigs to cut the joinery by
machine.

Which leaves the hobbyists.

If you're just doing woodworking to build stuff, I guess I can see the point
of this. It (presumably) gets results fast.

But, when you get right down to it, money can't buy skill. And if you're
pursuing woodworking as a semi-serious hobby, surely you'd like to actually
learn something along the way? The secret to good dovetails isn't a different
saw, or a different dovetail guide, or the perfect chisel, or some other
doodad you buy. It's practice. Ditto every other joint that this machine can
cut, with the exception of a box joint [0]. Maybe I'm grossly misunderstanding
the point of a hobby for most people, but I pursue mine to get better at
something I'm not already doing, not to be a drone feeding a machine I don't
understand. Raney Nelson put it thusly: "If you cannot already do the
machine’s job by hand, the machine will outwit you" [1].

I won't start my own shop once I finish school. Just like software, there's
things you learn in school, and things you learn doing the trade for money.
I'd like to learn the things you learn doing it for money in an established
shop.

Eventually, I would like to have my own shop. At that point, I think it's an
inevitability that I'll need to take jobs that don't pay enough to do all hand
work. And I'll own a Leigh [2] dovetail jig, like most everybody else. And
I'll probably own a Festool Domino [3] for loose tenon joinery, because that's
basically the direction mortise and tenon joinery is headed at the middle of
the market on down [4]. And god-of-your-choice help me, if I end up taking
more than a handful of cabinet jobs, I'll own a couple sets of cope and stick
router bits and a panel-raising bit for the doors. But I don't see owning a
MatchSticks machine. Existing tools are faster.

So as near as I can tell, the target market is hobbyists who aren't actually
that serious about learning their hobby? Which I concede is perilously close
to a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. At the end of the day, if they're going to take
this commercial, is their target addressable market big enough to cover their
R&D costs and the cost of actually building a production run?

As a courtesy to anybody who replies: I'm heading to sleep (East Coast), but
I'll check back tomorrow. And if you're curious what I do: I'm on instagram
[5] and I've uploaded some higher-res (but still crummy) pictures to Google
Drive [6]

[0] I don't think anybody who wasn't selling something would seriously suggest
cutting a box joint with anything other than a box-joint set on a tablesaw.
Yes, you _could_ do it with a router and Leigh sells a jig to do so [1], but a
tablesaw is better in basically every way. And technically, you could do it by
hand, but there would be a lot more fitting than for an equivalent dovetail
joint with no actual benefit. If you aren't making box joints by the
thousands, they're basically made to be cut on a tablesaw.

[1] [http://www.daedtoolworks.com/lounge-against-the-machine-
daed...](http://www.daedtoolworks.com/lounge-against-the-machine-daedlab-
commandments-1-and-2/)

[2] [https://www.leighjigs.com/](https://www.leighjigs.com/)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYW_9MgSp6Q)

[4] I'm curious how Leigh feels about this development. I'm willing to bet
they aren't thrilled; they make mortise and tenon jigs too.

[5] [https://instagram.com/teaandsawdust](https://instagram.com/teaandsawdust)

[6] [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-
vevIh...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wQKGxaqWfRzNoc-
vevIhd3BkgnHpkgbb)

~~~
mauvehaus
TL; DR: As I was brushing my teeth, I realized this is basically the bread
machine of woodworking tools. If you're making commercial quantities of bread,
you need a bigger machine. If you're making bread for the joy of making bread,
why use a machine at all?

~~~
roel_v
The fun in making bread is not in the kneading. Kneading is brainless work.
Bread enthousiast forums are rife with talk about bread machines - both
kneading machines and full bread making machines. I understand the picture
you're trying to paint, but like so many cute analogies, when the fundamental
premises don't even hold, what's the point?

~~~
mauvehaus
Your point is fair; I don't actually make my own bread. I was just going off
of the large number of people I know who have bought a bread machine, made a
single-digit number of loaves of bread, lost interest, and never used it
again.

The point here being that if you aren't engaging with the hobby enough to
really learn it, there's not really enough in it to hold your interest long
term.

I think the difference between "normal people" and bread enthusiasts is how
they approach the bread machine. Bread enthusiasts, I assume, come at it from
the angle of having engaged with the hobby and are looking to reduce some of
the drudgery. "Normal people" come at from the angle of "sweet, I can make
bread!", realize that if all you want is a loaf of bread, you're better off
just buying one, and lose interest.

If you're a bread enthusiast, can you shed some light on this?

~~~
roel_v
Not sure - some tools can make you do things you couldn't before, or do them
better. There is no way to simulate high temp/steam/low temp cycles without a
programmable steam oven, and some types of joints are near impossible without
elaborate jigs or tools. I don't think being a pro or hobbyist is the
difference here. The OP seems like a cool thing to build, but it seems like a
solution looking for a problem too. Plenty of bread enthousiasts just like the
smell and taste of fresh bread, which they can't get from the store, and the
easiest way to get that, will do. Just like some people might like nicely
dovetailed cabinets with tight glueless joints, and will use anything to get
that, as you can't buy that sort of thing.

Not sure what my point is or where I'm going with this. Many things are highly
inefficient to do yourself. People still do them. Does that mean you always
have to use the most low tech methods? People have different desires and goals
and objectives. I wouldn't spend my money betting on the OP being a great
market success, but then again, there are quite a number of 3d printer
companies, who also build niche tools, that seem to survive...

------
mc32
I’ve enjoyed or appreciated this kind joinery, but never could do the job
right (given limited tools, though that doesnt stop a craftsman).

This is Very cool. Hope they Kickstart it or something.

------
theothermkn
The whole project smells of YouTube woodworking culture. That's not a bad
thing! It's just that the device itself reads like a CNC Pantorouter
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI)).
They show a table-top workbench.
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjqWvpdNbms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjqWvpdNbms))
And, the final example is of "Korean Joinery"
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4lOeUYoDME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4lOeUYoDME)).

None of this is damning. It just gave me a heck of a sense of deja vu as I
watched. I almost expected stop-motion clamps to squeak by, a la Frank
Howarth!

~~~
monochromatic
It doesn't have much Paul Sellers in it though.

------
blattimwind
(A miniature horizontal CNC mill for cutting joints in the spirit of the
pantorouter)

~~~
gitgud
The [1] pantorouter by Matthias Wandel is an amazing invention. Anyone
interested in woodworking has probably seen his YouTube videos too.

[1] [https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/](https://woodgears.ca/pantorouter/)

~~~
a2tech
Did you see he’s taking a hiatus from making videos? According to his YouTube
channel his shoulder is in bad shape and he’s moving to be near his wife’s
family.

~~~
monochromatic
I hadn't heard that. That's too bad--his videos are fun. I've learned a good
bit from him, and I even built the box joint jig from his plans.

------
notananthem
Eh. Better to clamp the workpiece to something rigid. Much better to have
steel pattern routers with templates and making new ones is loads quicker than
programming. CNC is for toolpathing not rudimentary work humans would be
better at

------
VectorLock
I'd love to make this. I wonder if they'll publish the code and plans.

~~~
abakker
I hope so- I have a full size cnc, but this format would be great. I assume
it’s grbl with a custom UI?

------
ph0rque
One more tool I would like for my future garage microfactory!

