Here at Tormach we love to tell your stories. So here's Mike Dubno in New York
City, who's making a little bit of everything,
including some unique automata. I've always liked the idea of being able to
get a machine to do something, and so I had a computer very early on, before IBM
pcs, and things like that. And I actually took stepper motors, and I wrote stepper
motor drivers. I built my own. And I took my sisters Smurfs, and I put him on the
stepper motors, and got them to animate. And the natural progression for that was
actually start machining. So I started off with tiny little machines, like a
little Shureline, and that was good. it did what it needed to do but it wasn't
big enough for what I needed. And then I got a Smithy that was good.
It was manual. I learned some tricks and then, what I really wanted to do is build
much more sophisticated machines. Sophisticated shapes. And the machine
that I chose was a Tormach because it had the right price point, and also was
able to get down the stairs into my basement. Everybody has a story of how
their workshop came to be. And usually it is a theft of space that somebody else
wanted to use. Usually a spouse. For me, part of buying this house, the intrigue
and the actually the impetus for buying it, was when the inspector came and looked
at the electrical panel, saw a 400 amp service and said you could run a machine
shop down here. And this was unprompted. Now this house is not outside of New
York City. It is right next to Central Park. It is not a natural place where a
machine shop is, or has been, or anyone would think naturally about that, but for
some reason the guy during the inspection used that term. That couldn't
have been more magical, and so I said, "okay, honey we have to now purchase the
house just because this is the logical place to put a machine shop." And the
problem of course is that there were only six foot ceilings at the time. There
was a wood beam running through. There were air-conditioning ducts running
through. And there was a fairly steep staircase to get stuff down. And so the
natural thing was to call Jimmy Diresta. Oh yeah. So Jimmy and Dave Welder came,
luckily on Thanksgiving. My brother came. My son came.
And I did management of the project. Well they all figured out how to get it down
the stairs. I claimed sickness, which I did have but, but they still had to do
all the work. The reason why I build machines, is that I actually like taking
things that are normally inanimate and seeing what happens if I actually just
add some artificial intelligence, some robotics, some idea of motion to it. Maybe
showing some information, or something like that.
In the case of the sand table, for example, there's a regular coffee table,
but it springs to life, and draws something new every night. Right. At
parties it actually will draw all kinds of different things. The light show is
intriguing. That was built about 10, 12, years ago, and that was fairly unique at
the time. Tenta-Lux is a different thought process, which is take something
inanimate, like a light fixture, and maybe the light fixture can interact with its
surroundings. Maybe you do that by telling it what to do using something
like Amazon's Alexa. Cancel. Huh. Or maybe you do it by having it have a camera
system, and be aware of its environment and then interact with its environment.
And I could just see that that growing, and maybe it's intriguing. Maybe it will
help you people or maybe it's a waste of time, but the only way to find out is you
build one right now. You have a standard light fixture, but if you add a plate, it
will automatically light it, which is useful if you like to have plates on
your table. Magic. Take it away and one plate stands, well.
One of the reasons why I built it is because I have a CNC machine. And so,
whenever I get a new machine, I like to figure out what's a good fun project for
me to push my abilities. And so, I build something like the tentacle lamp. It
required lots of vertebra. And required some plates. Required some 3D type of
things, all which were possible to do a one-off type of part manually but almost
impossible to do unless you had an automated machine. And so every machine I
get I try to figure out what project that sort of inspires me to do. And
obviously a CNC machine like this inspires me to do a lot more. Thanks for
watching. Check out all of our latest videos here, and for more metalworking
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