Early on in planning the design for the Quadrotor, we knew that eventually some of the metal parts would need to be milled.  Having very little milling experience, other than a couple of basic-use classes at TechShop, I had no milling experience.  When it came time to start buying router bits for the ShopBot and Tormach CNC routers, I didn’t know what kind of bits were necessary.

Understanding End Mills

Greg over at 100kGarages put together a primer titled CNC Router Bits Demystified, which does a great job of explaining the basics of an End Mill, Ball Nose, Downcut, Upcut etc.

A couple of years ago I started looking at what it would take to make a quadcopter.  At the time, I only had the limited tools at the Austin hackerspace available to me (which I don’t think even has a space anymore).  So I shelved the idea since I didn’t see a time effective way to make any of the components.  Fast forward to a few months ago when I joined the TechShop in Austin.  Now I have no excuses to not make a custom Quadrotor.