During my stay at Pilchuck Glass School as Scientists in Residence with Quentin Bolsee and Neil Gershenfeld, all from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, I decided to revisit a project I had in mind a long time ago. I blow glass and primarily use cane for design and color application.

Cutting cane feels like a tedious, boring, and not particularly safe task (the silica dust I see with every chop can’t be doing any good), so I started wondering: why not build an automatic cane cutter, with the potential to later evolve into an automatic murrine cutter

When making machines, we try to make them as smooth as possible, but in this case, it was nice to have an excuse to design a guillotine-like CAM mechanism.

For the record, this machine was donated to Pilchuck that sold it at the auction for the benefit of the shcool. Im deeply grateful for all that this school has given to me.

Huge thanks to Quentin that did all the PCB design and the user interface.

Check the machine here at Pilchuck doing its thing.