$325USD for the 17" LS Positioner. But, you need a router table. I hate the dog bone look, prefer my wood working to look hand made.
Seems about right. After a little bit of playing in F360, v-carving with any arbitrary imported SVG is so trivially easy, I'm not sure what possible advantage V-Carve could have: Build stock object Import SVG drawing from Illustrator/Affinity/Inkscape (or draw directly on model surface) and position it correctly Jump over into CAM/Manufacture, do Setup and any facing or other cleanup operations you may need to do for surface prep as usual Go into 2D and select Engrave operation Tool is a chamfer mill, you define your dimensions and cutting parameters For geometry, just go into Models > [Name] > Sketches and select your [Imported sketch name] Set your operations heights (lower is faster, higher is safer!) in the next tab, and then you can ignore everything else and hit ok. Go to simulate, turn off your model visibility, and admire your hard work! Seems like you can't do single-line vectors because Fusion relies on the distance between the two lines to determine the grooving depth. Unless you provide it with lead-in and lead-out lines using 3D sketching, which isn't worth the effort- just stroke the lines with a variable width in your vector software and then expand/convert the strokes to lines/shapes.
The only reason I can see me buying V carve is because it does rotary carving of .stl files so...if I ever get a chance to build my rotary lathe i may purchase it. The future is in the sales of wooden Harry Potter wands and the future is now.
It would be interesting to see if there were expressly a way to build and CAM a rotary part in Fusion and then post-process it into a Cartesian part to fool grbl into running it without running into "no y-axis limit switch" out-of-travel errors or anything like that. And yeah, you can't have enough wands for sale! As a propmaker I'm definitely seeing the need for an Avid-type machine before much longer, based on industry trends. I've made space for a 1500x1000x400 envelope in the shop, we'll see when it happens. Possibly a 4th axis too, if I could summon the effort to switch from grbl to LinuxCNC on a second machine.
Yeah, I'm looking at an Avid Pro4824 myself. Though, there is a design taking shape on CNCZone, Brevis-HD, that I'm following. It seems to promise a very rigid structure which would allow good non-ferrous metal milling and very fast wood/plastic/foam speed. If the costs are in the same ballpark as a Pro4824, I may well take the leap. You might not have to drop GRBL for a 4th axis, there are several variants of the ARM ports that support that. And, people are becoming fed up with the slow progress of the main stream version to 32 bit so the baton may be getting passed by default. Would love to have a 32bit GRBL communicating via ethernet rather than USB and doing much more sophisticated motion control than the 8 bit Arduino is capable of.
$3600 seems a little steep to me, that's probably somewhere around where I'm at on my mill conversion, including the mill. So far I'm pretty sure I'm looking at about $1200-1500 for major components, and another $500-800 for everything else, at least in its initial configuration. I was gonna start work on building it and FEA but I can't find the OB STLs anywhere. May just have to download FreeCAD to use the IGES or something. I'm also looking at 20mm rail and 1610 ballscrews- anyone who does the couple days of shopping around will come to the same conclusion, it's a no-brainer, they're so reasonably priced. Mine will be long-ways like an Avid rather than widthways like his HD though, because it's gonna take a 2.2kW ER20 spindle. Plates will be machined on the converted mill, probably from 1/2" and 3/4" 6061. To keep the price down, initial motors will be open loop NEMA 23 + $38 32-bit drivers, but everything about this machine is designed for upfront value and profitability and back-end upgradability over time. Working envelope should be around 800x1200x300, or somewhere in that ballpark. Bench will be hollow-centered to allow for a 16-20" 4th axis swing later. The idea is to be able to make things like this in one shot (whether I would or not is another matter, but the possibility is there) from urethane tooling foam or the like: That was originally an 8-month project for the master with >$1000 of Smooth-On products, then casting and painting/assembly time. Not viable, long-term!
