Current Motor Company is a member of the A2 Mech Shop (A2MS), a co-working space in Ann Arbor, Mich. We built our early prototypes there. We still do R&D and electronics assembly at A2MS, although our main production and sales activities have moved to a 10,000 square foot facility a mile down the road.

This week, we started production of Version 2 of our Bike Control Unit, the computer that runs the fuel gauge and the safety features of the bike. It’s really the “brains” of the bike, so the goodness is in the software and the electronic circuits that interface the sensors to the software so it has good data with which to work. But there are all those pesky details, which includes such mundane things as cases. And holes in the cases for the connectors.

Like any other electronics experimenter, I’ve made my share of nasty-looking panels with a drill and a file. And I’ve spent painstaking hours turning knobs on a milling machine to make better-looking panels and even spent lots of money to have good panels made at a real machine shop.

This is so cool! One of the guys at A2MS, Peter Jensen, bought this huge old CNC mill and refurbished it. His excuse, er, I mean business justification, is to make his tech-retro-fashionable nixie-tube clocks.

Today, we cut 24 end panels for BCUs. It took about half an hour. That doesn’t count the lesson on how to convert CAD files to NC data and run the machine, but that was part of the fun.

Of course, cutting plastic panels is almost beneath the dignity of this big precision machine. But it’s fast, the quality is fantastic and it’s paid for, so why not?

There is so much more we can do with this machine. We’ve already made some precision assembly jigs and fixtures for building the bikes. What’s next? Motor parts? All sorts of crazy custom machined billet bling? Or more boring cases?

Here is the machine at A2MS, running our parts. The PC-based control panel is to the right, and there is a Bridgeport-style manual mill to the left.