Hello everyone!
We are excited to say that metal is in motion and we are officially cutting material 
At this point the number of parts made is small, but we went round one of the machine shops and took some snaps of where things are at for us all to marvel upon.Let’s get right into it!
Two Fractals At A Time!
Here it is, the image we’ve all been waiting for! Cutters hitting metal for the first time and milling out the cornerstone fractals from aluminium on a 5 axis CNC milling machine. (Kindly paused here so that we could get this snap without getting covered in coolant!)
The Base Of Operations
Next up we have some very nice Vise base plates going through the final stages of machining bringing them to the right thickness on a 3 axis CNC mill, a real workhorse of the shop.
Drilling Holes Is Boring
But it’s not all about milling, we’ve also taken over a number of Swiss type turning machines too! Here we are excitedly boring out a brass bar that will become the brass bushes that are on every Vise.
A Bored Bunch Of Rings
After being bored to within a micron of its life, the bushes are parted off and will sit in storage ready to be joined to its stub shaft at the special press fitting ceremony. These are nice and fast parts to turn, so these were building up quite quickly!
The Names Rod, Big Rod.
Next up we have some of the brass metal rods before they get fed into the Swiss machines next to some stainless steel that is destined to become stub shafts… I’m sure it was their dream.
Big Rods Bigger Mates
Even biggerer Rods lined up ready to be processed into our round bits.
Interesting Potatoes 
Potato sacks full of metal! This looks odd but there is method to the madness! Because of the scale of parts to be machined, a lot of the steel parts have been pre-cut down to size with a CNC bandsaw, so there is less waste metal removal in the machining process on each part. This reduces metal waste as the cuts the band saw can make are much thinner and faster than on a milling machine.
Are We Sure These Are Potatoes? 
Aaaand a whole load more potato sacks! These shiny guys are shaping up to be the soft brass fractals and much like the hefty bags of steel, these sacks o’ brass have been pre-sliced to reduce material waste and speed up the CNC operations that are coming up next!
Expensive Potatoes!
To the untrained eye, you’d think you hit the jackpot if you stumbled across this bag of yellow metal 
… I guess we could have used solid gold as a soft fractal
From Aeroplanes To Fractals
It’s not all blocked up though, for some parts it is still easier to get larger plates and machine multiple parts at the same time, then leave them partly connected together like an old Airfix kit. This a tonne of aerospace grade aluminium plate ready to go on the machines.
A Whole Lotta Plate
And here are 5 more tonnes, just in case there’s not enough there… these plates will become the upper fixed jaws, lower sliding jaws and lower fixed jaws of all the aluminium vices.
On The Straight And Narrow
This image only came in a few hours ago and is a batch of parallel jaws fresh off the machine (minus their brass bits).
Caging The Beast
We have also been testing the structural integrity of some new boxes (yes, that is as fun as it sounds). We have a new challenge with the Fractal Vise Desktop Workstation in that it’s the heaviest thing we have ever had to ship. Short of us using a wooden packing crate, we’d been struggling to pack it in a way that it didn’t make a bid for freedom when dropped.
We now have a neat foam lined heavy duty slim box that seems to be holding this bad boy in! No escaping here.