Part 1 (Literally)

Back in November of 2009 Todd started working on printing a Mendel on his CupCake CNC. He brought his work in progress over to a family dinner one night. He hadn't gotten very far at that time because of the hours required to print parts.

As we were all sitting around admiring the Mendel design when discussion turned to the cost of it. The cost of Mendel isn't bad, but you need access to a Reprap type machine like Todd's CupCake, and 60 hours of free time. At that point dad jumped in and said "Why don't you just cut them all out on the CNC?".

Mendel wasn't designed to be cut, it was designed to be printed. We all knew that it wouldn't be an easy endeavor to generate a Mendel design that can be machined. We looked hard at several other pioneers including the wooden mendel, the metal mendel, and others. They weren't very far along at the time enough to know that the idea was reasonable.

Todd got excited about the idea so I helped him finish upgrading his Shirline Mill into a CNC Mill so he could prototype without having to travel to Dad's to use the big one. At that point we were ready, with fresh licenses of Alibre Design in hand we started with one part, the infamous frame-vertex.