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Pete Oxenham Profile picture
Pete Oxenham
@peteoxenham
Machinist, software engineer, turned founder @ https://t.co/D5H1LTJYTb making brains for CNC machines | LAUNCH Accelerator 25. Opinions my own and most likely wrong.
Oct 12, 2025 • 26 tweets • 9 min read
An Idiot's Guide to Buying a CNC Machine (thread)
If you don't know where to start, here ya go. I'm going to miss a lot, but this thread should be a good primer.

Before we get into what the "best" machine is, we need to cover some basics about how you even buy one

pic: dorky 20 year old me on delivery day of my first ever machine, 10 years agoImage
Image 1) Find your salesperson. (Nearly) every machine tool brand sells through dealers. One dealer per brand per territory, usually a few brands per dealer. You'll have one rep, this will be your primary point of contact through the whole process. Start just googling "haas [your city]", doosan [your city] okuma [your city]" etc and reach out to all the ones you want on your radar. Give them your cell #, and a salesperson will reach out, probably from their own cell
Sep 28, 2024 • 21 tweets • 10 min read
The Bird Saga Tell-All: Here's the story of how I got my first $300k+ PO and turned my little race parts shop into a 24/7 CNC production facility (w/ pics!)

Story involves big risks, air mattresses, overloaded circuits, overfilled chip bins, A+ friends, and an industry legend.Image
Image October 2018 - My friend Scott posted on FB that he was looking for a CNC shop. I said "me!" and he told me I couldn't handle the volume (he was right).
Nevertheless I replied "when do you want me to start?"
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Jun 16, 2024 • 16 tweets • 8 min read
Okay, time for a DFM roast so all you engineers can see how machinists think. @emm0sh volunteered this part, I don't have the time to do a full write up so I'm just gonna live tweet me going through it, exposing the sins, and optimizing it

(1 of ?) Image Off the bat, we have the cardinal sin of zero radius internal pocket corners. A round tool can't get into a corner. Some of the others are radiused so I'm just assuming it's a mistake and i'm going to note that I'm making this change for later Image
Jan 21, 2024 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
Machining Apple's Vision Pro Headset
Apple's manufacturing processes are some of the best in the world, and shrouded in secrecy with the exception of their occasional manufacturing videos. Based on the clips, let's break down the machining shown in the latest video step by step. Extrusion - The vision pro headset starts as an extrusion which we see in the opening shot. Molten aluminum is pushed through a custom die to create bars (usually 12ft) of the outside profile.

From there, an automated saw cuts each bar to proper length for machining.
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