I am interested in all kinds of home manufacture and have recently taken to making moulds for carbon fibre propellers on my Proxxon CNC machine. The problem is that is will only mill softer materials. I would like to make some more permanent moulds and a sinker EDM sounds like a nice way to do it. It will also be a good way of making holes through rare earth magnets for actuators.

So here I will plot my progress or lack of in the production of a homebrew EDM.

I plan to make a small pulser type unit eventually but for some background and useful info here is a Russian book published in 1956 all about RC type EDM. It is entitled "Working Metals By Electro-Sparkng" and was published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. I have acquired a license to reproduce it for non profit use and so have scanned it and present it here for your downloading pleasure (appologies for the quality). It may be old but the text is very relevant and also practical, but unlike some books on home EDM has some science behind it which can help in own designs. Obviously most will replace the solonoid based electrode plunging systems described with CNC type systems but all the ideas are there.

I suspect my account will not stand up to a huge number of downloads so please save to disk once rather than view online.

"Working Metals By Electro-Sparking" (14.2mB) Please right click and select "save target as"