What Exactly is a Vector?

Sometimes we take the simplest things for granted. As an example, I started making CNC videos a little less than a year ago, and I thought I was making basic videos for the absolute beginner. Well, it turns out I haven’t been doing that at all. I fell into the same trap a lot of other people make, and that is assuming that folks already know what I’m talking about when I use certain words and phrases. Take the word Vector. I had never given it much thought. I figured that if a person was interested in CNC, they probably already had some basic knowledge of how they worked, and the steps involved in turning an idea into physical object. Maybe they didn’t know every step along the way, but there was probably at least an understanding that to get from point A to point D, you had to go through points B and C along the way. It turns out I, like a lot of other people, assumed too much. [expand title=”Read More”]

The first time I was asked what a vector actually was, I was kind of surprised by the question. The person told me that they were an absolute beginner, were trying to wrap their head around the process, and didn’t understand why they couldn’t just draw a line in Microsoft Paint, and get the CNC to cut that line. I walked them through the process, satisfied their curiosity, and didn’t give it much thought from there. That was about 9 months ago as I write this. Then, about 2 months ago, I was asked the same question – twice.

I’ve been asked that question at least half a dozen times in the last month alone. That led me the conclusion that as the CNC becomes cheaper and cheaper for the average woodworker to add to their arsenal of tools, there is a genuine need for this info. More and more people are exploring the thought of buying or building a CNC, so more and more people are asking the questions a lot of us take for granted. If you don’t know something, you just don’t know – there’s no shame in asking about it. I mean, that’s how you learn, right? None of us were born with this information. Someone told us, we read it, or we saw it in a video. The point is that we learned it somewhere. That’s why I decided to make this video.

Some of you seasoned veterans may think this is a silly topic to do a video about. Some of you may be genuinely interested. No matter where you fall in that spectrum, I do hope you’ll be able to take something from this video, no matter how trivial it may be. Don’t think so? Okay, ask yourself the same question; what is a vector? Don’t say that it’s a line – you’d be wrong.

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