Sienci Labs would like to wish everyone a happy Remembrance Day (also known as Veterans Day). We want to appreciate and remember all our national heroes who fought for us on this day of celebration. Let’s come together to remember and honour those who have fallen.
Hey everyone. Thank you to the makers who participated in the contest for this week. We loved seeing all the laser projects and are glad you enjoy using your LaserBeam Laser System to create such unique projects. It is always a pleasure to see projects shared within our community of creators.
Last Week’s Winner
We are happy to announce that Jim Long, John Fischer, Koala Karvings, Mark Klement, Little Owl Craft Co, and Andrew Shortt are the winners of the “A Project That Uses the LaserBeam” contest! A prize is coming your way!
This Week’s Theme: A Project That is Autumn/Thanksgiving Themed
We want to wish our American neighbours a Happy Thanksgiving and are bringing back our Autumn/Thanksgiving theme this week to celebrate with them! Help us celebrate by sharing with us all of your amazing Autumn/Thanksgiving-inspired projects made on your LongMill. We’ll select our favourite ones to send cool stuff to.
Happy Friday, everyone! We want to thank all who participated in the contest this week. We understand that this theme was a little harder than the others. Nonetheless, we’re proud of the outstanding workshop projects we’ve seen in our community of creators. We always look forward to seeing the projects shared within the community.
Last Week’s Winners
We are happy to announce that Jeff Richardson, Pop Culture Woodworking, Michael Trickey, Claude Knapp, Gary Bork, and Terry Babij are the winners of the “An Item That is Used for Your Workshop” contest! Watch out for a prize coming your way!
This Week’s Theme: A Project That Uses the LaserBeam
We have seen many of you enjoy using the LaserBeam. Now is your chance to win some free stuff with your LaserBeam project. Show off your best LaserBeam projects with us, and we will send makers of the ones we like awesome prizes!
Hey everyone, here is our Nov 2022 Production Updates.
I’m actually writing this update at the end of October since I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks, but this should lay out everything we’re working through this month. I’ll be in touch with the team on and off during this time, but figured I’d get this update ready to go.
After a 10-month hiatus, Louis, our CEO has returned from vacation.
LongMill MK2 and Extension Kit Orders
Production continues to move smoothly for all LongMill and Extension Kit orders. We paused production for about a week while we restocked on lead screws, but we have received the new batch and will continue to have machines go out the door at our regular pace. We’ve also restocked on a new batch of front and back steel feet, gantries, and rails. Lead times for this month should be around 1-2 weeks for most machines.
Batch 6 is nearly over with just over 100 machines left for this batch. Batch 7 will have essentially no differences since most improvements have been made gradually throughout Batch 6. Some of the improvements include:
Higher grade washers to prevent bending of the washers used with eccentric nuts
Custom machined v-wheels to higher tolerances
Additional QA processes including checking variance and tolerances throughout all of our aluminum extrusions
Additionally, we’ve implemented some process changes in the office such as:
Kanban for 3D printed parts and some assembled parts
Torque settable electric screwdrivers for XZ gantry assemblies to ensure all screws are tight before shipping
Specialized measuring tools for checking fit and tolerances
Additional foam padding in packaging to reduce denting and scratching
SOPs on tablets and QA databases
Version tracking for all variations of parts
New MRP systems to help keep track of inventory
Our operations team and our staff have generally noted that Batch 6 has been the smoothest batch we’ve had so far with minor issues (except maybe the big one at the start of 2022). We expect Batch 7 to be even better.
Currently, we are looking at seeing ourselves run low in the next few weeks on linear guides and a few small sets of hardware, but are expected to restock in mid-to-late November.
LaserBeam Orders
We are currently stocked on LaserBeams and most orders are going out within a few days. We are also expecting to complete the first batch of roughly 1000 units as well near the end of the year.
Black Friday Sales
As of this time, we do not have any sales planned for Black Friday. We simply believe that providing the same reasonable prices for our products at any time of the year is the best way to run our business. If you’re looking to get into CNCing, we recommend customers order their machines whenever they are ready. We suspect that most customers will find our pricing quite reasonable even when other companies are selling theirs at a discount.
We have never had a discount (with the exception of the Kickstarter campaign) on the LongMill since its release.
At the end of the day, we want people to have confidence that they are getting the best deal on their purchase no matter when they place their order, and we also want to focus more of our time on important stuff like designing machines and growing our community over focusing on selling more stuff.
Just a reminder for everyone to be nice
Something that I am continually grateful for is our active, healthy, and supportive community. We now have nearly 10,000 users across our platforms today from over 30 countries. For all of our amazing community members, thank you for being part of what we are today.
Based on feedback from our support staff and other members of our team, as hobby CNCing becomes more popular and prevalent in our society, expectations and demographics continue to change as well, introducing a wider audience beyond our early group of adopters. Over time, our groups have become more diverse demographically and what people are using their CNC machines for, which is amazing.
It should be noted that although we don’t personally post publically that often, many of us at the company personally stay active on the groups and read most of the posts that you make. I make it a habit to check the forums and Facebook group at least once or twice a day to see how things look in the community and see what’s new, even though it’s rare for me to post or comment in general.
But of course, with every large group, there can be some negativity. We welcome complaints and criticism, whether posted online or directed to us privately, we use these messages to make improvements to what we do on a continual basis. I also hope that customers give us a chance to help them and let us work out the kinks that may arise, as well as open to learning to work with us as we navigate to getting started in a new hobby.
That being said, with recent growth in the community, I have also seen the rate of negative commentary and harassment pointed at us and to the company directly increase as well. I do not accept harassment aimed toward our staff and I have continually been working to help our staff navigate these situations.
In response to this, we’ve worked to create some internal processes and policies to help take care of these matters, as well as post a Customer Support Terms of Service note at the end of our Contact Us page. For our online communities, thank you to our members who’ve stepped up to comment back when people have made negative and untrue comments.
We are people. We have feelings. We love and care about our community and we do our best to make this a fun and accessible ecosystem. Please remember to be nice to us and each other.
End-of-Year Holidays
As we typically do, we are on closing for holidays from Dec 23rd to Jan 2nd. If you have any questions or need anything shipped out, please reach out to us before the 23rd. There may be some of us providing limited holiday support and getting ready for the new year, but the large majority of us will be on holiday.
Good afternoon everyone! We thank the makers who participated in this week’s FANGtastic contest. We have seen so many cool decorative Halloween projects that it was hard for us to select the best ones from the patch. Thank you all for celebrating the spooky season with us. We love seeing the projects shared within the community.
Last Week’s Winners
We are happy to announce that Dian Smit, Jerry Giardina, Joshua Larson, Against the Grain Outdoors, Dylan Greene, and Greg Simpson are the winners of the “A Project That is Halloween-Themed” contest! Lookout for a prize!
This Week’s Theme: An Item That is Used for Your Workshop
This week’s theme is “items that are used for your machine/workshop”. Post your clamps, computer trays, benches, and other machine/workshop setup-related items that have been made on the LongMill, and we’ll pick the best ones to send creators awesome prizes to.
New gSender release with a number of feature improvements and fixes.
Two big ones we’d like to highlight:
Surfacing Tool Changes
The surfacing tool has been slightly redesigned and comes with some new features.
Some feature improvement highlights include:
The cutting tool now ramps into position on all generated toolpaths instead of plunging in
Can now start from center
Easy to flip direction of cutting
Easy copy-to-clipboard to save generated toolpaths for later
Number of generative issues that could leave unfinished passes
Visualizer improvements
We’ve rewritten how the visualizer generates and displays toolpaths to result in lower memory usage after parsing. This should be particularly noticeable with larger files – gSender is using less memory by a relatively large factor when visualization is enabled.
As an example, for a 28 megabyte gcode file (~1.5 million lines), these are some comparisons of what the memory values were previously and what they are now:
You should also notice slightly faster visualization due to these changes.
Our benchmarking and profiling has also identified some issues with the library we’re using to parse the toolpaths themselves using excessive amounts of memory. This will be addressed in an upcoming release. We have a relatively long list of performance improvements we plan to address over the next few builds to make sure gSender runs well on lower-hardware spec devices, and this is the first part of that.
Release Notes:
Improved surfacing tool – pattern now ramps in to support more surfacing bit types, cut direction is reversible, able to start from center, can copy gcode to clipboard for saving.
Major improvements to visualizer memory usage and parsing speed
Start from line should account for maximum file Z height when moving into position to account for situations where Z0 is set at the spoilboard.
Probe code should always return to exact starting location instead of approximating it.
Improvements to firmware flashing UX – can now select profile and port inside tool.
Fix for auto-probe code movements being too small when “$13 report as inches” EEPROM value enabled
Go To buttons only use safe height if below that position when limit switches enabled to avoid moving downwards.
Fixed values in some machine profiles.
Added machine state guards to some keyboard shortcuts.
UI Modals now more difficult to close accidentally.
Bracket Comments on M0/M1 now emitted to UI.
Laser offsets preferences allow negative values again
Bounding Box variables once again available to macros
Mac version now exits completely on close.
Higher UI clarity when connecting to board with invalid/unrecognizable firmware
Styling changes in Firmware Tool
Fixed overflow when OS had screen zoom above 100%.
Happy closer to Halloween, folks! We want to give a huge thanks to the individuals who entered this week’s faBOOlous contest. We saw a lot of wickedly wild projects. It was difficult for us to pick our most favorites ones from the patch. Thank you again for celebrating with us. We always look forward to seeing the projects shared within the community.
Last Week’s Winners
We are happy to announce that Gary Bork, Dennis Vellopoulos, Academx Woodcraft, Mike Born, Wayne Baxter Jr, and Ryan Johnson are the winners of the “A Project That is Halloween-Themed” contest! Lookout for a prize!
This Week’s Theme: A Project That is Halloween-Themed
Happy spooky season everyone! Celebrate the last week of October with us by sharing your Halloween-themed projects made on your LongMill. We will select our favourite spooky projects and send some scary (not really) prizes to the makers!
Happy spooky month, folks! We want to thank the makers who participated in this week’s awesomely gruesome contest. We have seen plenty of bone-chilling creations and are ecstatic to have you celebrate this Halloween season with us. We love seeing all the projects shared within the community.
Last Week’s Winners
We are happy to announce that Sheldon Bradley, Chris Gamble, Brad Copeland, Jeremy Bergh, Nick Hellier, and Travis Norris are the winners of the “A Project That is Halloween-Themed” contest! A prize coming your way!
This Week’s Theme: A Project That is Halloween-Themed
A short message from our Content Creator, Scott Saari
Happy spooky season everyone! Celebrate the rest of the month with us by sharing your Halloween-themed projects made on your LongMill. We will select our favourite spooky projects and send some scary (not really) prizes to the makers!
Happy October, folks! We want to give a huge thanks to those who participated in the contest this week. We’ve seen many creative Autumn/Thanksgiving-themed projects and are grateful that you all are celebrating the fall season and Thanksgiving with us. We’re always looking forward to seeing all the projects shared within the community.
Last Week’s Winners
We are happy to announce that Zack Lamson, Nathan Weaver, Joshua Larson, Jerry Giardina, Kyle Fournier, and Juanita Kimbel are the winners of the “A Project That is Autumn/Thanksgiving-Themed” contest! Look out for a prize coming your way!
P.S. We will be closed Monday, October 10th for Thanksgiving Day and back in the office on Tuesday, October 11th.
This Week’s Theme: A Project That is Halloween-Themed
A short message from our Content Creator, Scott Saari
Happy spooky season everyone! Get ready to celebrate this month with us by sharing your Halloween-themed projects made on your LongMill. We will select our favourite spooky projects and send some scary (not actually) prizes to the makers!
Hey folks. I’m excited to share a new project and all of the files and details to make an Adirondack/Muskoka chair on the LongMill! Scott, our in-house content creator and maker-supreme, wanted to add a few nice, high-quality chairs for his backyard, and so we set out to make a CNCable chair that can be made on the LongMill and basically any hobby CNC of a similar size.
This project was designed by me (Andy) and cut out by Scott in his shop. While this project has a lot of parts, the actual process to make them should be pretty straightforward since a lot of it is repetitive setup and cutting. While this is a perfect project for a beginner, I encourage advanced users to find ways to customize and modify our designs to add their own unique flair.
We continue our series of projects that you can make with your LongMill. To check out the one from before, visit our page here: https://sienci-upgrade3.cospark.io/2022/08/04/how-to-make-a-giant-connect-4-on-your-longmill. You can support us by subscribing to our Youtube channel and sharing projects that you’ve made from our designs online! If you have any ideas or projects you want to see us do, feel free to reach out or comment on our social media!
This was a bear to design. There were a lot of things we learned through the 4 or 5 different iterations it took to hammer it out. During the design process, it’s important for us to not just make a great design, but make it so that:
The materials you need for the project can be found universally and at a reasonable price
The materials can be of varying qualities but still work
The design can fit on a standard 30×30 working area
The tooling and techniques to make the project is accessible and easy enough for beginner users
Here’s what some back and forth looked like between me and Scott for making updates:
The newest version has some tweaks made compared to the version in the video which include:
Better placement of screw holes
Slightly shorter chair to fit knees better
If you see a design flaw, please feel free to let us know.
A foam test chair
Finding the right materials
Finding the right materials for this project was a major challenge. Our first prototype used some 3/4″ cedar boards, but because lumber manufacturers are bad at measuring things, the actual thickness came out closer to 1/2″, but not to a degree of consistency that would let us make good joints without doing extra work planing and cutting down the boards. There was a lot of warp and cupping in the boards, making it even more difficult to fit things together. This resulted in poorly fitting parts and weak spots in the cut boards.
You can probably see it better in these photos and videos below:
3/4″ wood is strong enough for this project, so if you can get it while being dimensionally stable, I would probably get that stuff. The Onshape document does have some variables to help you adjust the size of the model based on the material thickness.
Another slightly annoying constraint was the widths of the wood we could buy for this project. It was important to us to use solid wood, at least for the sake of the asthetics that Scott wanted for his house, so we needed to use standard size boards. In our case, the best option was to use 6in wide boards (or 5.5 – 5.7in roughly), all of the parts needed to fit within that width.
According to Scott, this project uses about 56 feet of board (or 7 x 8 ft boards).
Slotting and lining things up
If you’ve seen some of the other designs I’ve made, I like to have things slot and fit together. The Connect 4 would be a good example.
Well, given the variability of the thickness in the wood boards, even between throughout the board itself, it was hard to make a design that could actually have parts slot together. So I instead removed the need for things to slot together at all. This means that even if your material isn’t exactly the right thickness, you’ll still get a great chair. Basically all of the parts have a line or surface that can be used to line things up when putting the chair together (the arm support triangles are going to need a bit of eye-balling).
Cutting
Originally we had planned to cut the project using 1/4″ bit for the outside profiles and a 1/8″ bit for the holes, but we found that a 1/8″ bit for the whole project was a lot more convenient given that there’s no tool changes involved and less dust to clean up. Using the smaller bit does end up being a bit slower, but since this is a one-off project, time wasn’t a huge concern.
Cutting all of the parts should take about 2, maybe 3 hours. You can use feeds and speeds that you are comfortable with your material, but the gcode provided in the project files are set to 100IPM at 0.2″ depth of cut. It’s likely you can bump up the speed while cutting to your taste with the manual feedrate overrides.
Workholding
Scott suggests using hot glue as a way to keep the part coming out of its spot while cutting. I think this is a pretty good method overall, albiet a bit messy at times. For myself on the otherhand, I will cut the screw holes first and use them as a place to put some wood screws to keep the part in place as the outside gets cut out. Either method works.
Assembly
Please enjoy these exploded views of the chair. You can also check our 3D model as a reference for where things should go.
All of the parts are designed to fit together with quality, #8-1.5″ wood screws. Holes are pre-drilled with the CNC, but you may need to drill additional holes into support parts such as the triangles and the back supports.
Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up this month. Our offices will be closed Oct7-10th.
Wow we are shipping LongMill orders by the pallet now!
LongMill MK2 and Extension Kit Orders
Production continues to move smoothly for all LongMill and Extension Kit orders. Most machines are shipping out within 1-2 weeks, and oftentimes sooner.
We are expecting to run out of the 1030mm lead screws that are used in various quantities between all sizes of the LongMill around the middle of October.
We have another partial batch expected to arrive at the end of the month, which means that shipping may be paused around this time. We will update our Order Status page with updated information if there is a shipping delay.
We expect lead times for machine orders to be around 1-2 weeks for the next few weeks before we update our lead times when we run out of lead screws.
A small piece of news to share, we have now switched completely to custom manufacturing v-wheels. This means more consistency, quality, and accuracy for the wheels in general, which have been historically a tricky point for us. The quality for the first 30,000 looks to be excellent so far.
LaserBeam Orders
We still have ready-to-go stock on LaserBeams. Most are getting shipped out within a few days.
Ikenna has been doing livestreams for working with the LaserBeam. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure visit our Youtube channel!
USD to CAD Exchange Rate
At the time of writing, the exchange rate for USD to CAD is 1 USD = 1.36 CAD. Because our base currency is in Canadian, this means that the exchange rate is heavily in favor of the Americans. That means that while the price for our products is basically the same for Canadians, our neighbors down South can purchase from us at a pretty significant discount.
Based on the reports that I’ve been receiving from RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), their projections are expected to see the USD to CAD conversion continue to be in favor of the USD for some time.
Because our base prices are all in CAD, this means that the margins for each machine decrease as the exchange rate changes in favor of the USD. Thankfully, because most of the material and production costs come in the local area, we are not as impacted as our competitors that have a higher percentage of materials coming from the US and overseas or US competitors selling into Canada. Additionally, much of the purchasing for Batch 7 was done when the exchange rate was around 1 USD = 1.26 CAD, a more favorable rate.
As the continuing economic turmoil continues, it will be interesting to see how us as a business will move forward.
The silver lining to this is that the small discount that our southern neighbors will be getting may stimulate more economic business in Canada.
