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Hi everyone. My first post here is looking for some feedback from any Carvrwright users that have been using X-carve. Positive, negatives when comparing the two platforms? I love my Carvewright and I have hundreds of hours of carves on my machine. The only real complaint that I have is it is not really heavy duty enough for routing heavy V-carve work or making parts. The flex shaft design just doesn’t transfer the power needed for these operations if done on a regular basis.
So if you made the jump and have some feedback on what you like or don’t like then I would love to hear it
I made the jump. Sold my carvewright for a good amount to put towards the xcarve. There is a bit of a learning curve. I would say the carvewright is more self contained in that all you need and can use for that matter is what the company makes and sells. With the xcarve there are no software or file limitations. The only thing I miss about the carvewright is the 3d scanning probe.
Hi Joe, Thanks for responding. I’ll be keeping my Carvewright as I have several projects on there which I wouldn’t want to have to replicate… and it’s still a nice machine to have when running strictly raster carves.
If I can ask you a little more about how you use the X-carve and Easel then I would be curious about how much V-carve work you have done with your machine and how you compare the quality compared to Carvewright? I always found the Carvewright to be a little erratic and/or sloppy caving anything in v-carve. The only exception was the vectors you drew within Designer as they always carved out very quick and clean. Most of my v-carve work involved detailed images that had to be imported into a font file and brought into Designer… not ideal at all.
My primary reason of moving to a new system is to experience a noticeable improvement in V-carve and pocket routing work.
Thanks again for your input! ( don’t know if we ever spoke on Carvewright forums… my username is Ton80 over there )
I still look every now and then for some way to conver ptn files to something I can use. I have so many just sitting in a folder. I don’t do a ton of v carving in any software but what I have done in easel is much easier to set up and get consistent results because the work piece doesn’t need to move.
What I did with easel is made a bunch of projects to get a understanding of the machine and software. Broke some cheap bits then moved up to a bigger software. I really wanted to be able to carve 3D files so I needed to. The new v carve feature is good. I have been testing it for about a month. Let me see if I can share some sample v carves I did.
I think just being able to fasten down your work piece you will see noticeable improvements in quality.
The two machines are black and white so you almost have to start over learning everything. A trouble-shooting/tutorial section on the web site with video walk thru of common problems and issues would be great.
Like he had mentioned he’s keeping his machine to still be able to carve his custom designs. I don’t know the legality of it but in the future if easel can do 3d and also import the carvewright files that would be good.
Maybe a short questionnaire when your purchasing a xcarve on what kind of cncing you have done or what kind you want to do followed by suggestions on what add ons to buy based on your answers.
When a new order is placed really emphasize how helpful it would be to read the forum while waiting for your machine to arrive.
Ill post if I think of more
@JohnGowrie correct me if I’m wrong it’s been a little but .ptn and .mpc I think. If you own a few of the carvewright designer add ons you can convert to stl but the addons are not cheap.
Yeah… the .ptn files store your individual pattern elements and the .mpc files are the project file that you save your layout on the virtual board. Both are proprietary as are just about everything associated with Carvewright… another reason I am leaning towards something different. The add-ons and upgrades required to get where I think I want to be with the Carvewright system would cost upwards of around $1000 and then I still need to consider a new machine.
I can say that I played around with Easel the other night. I just wanted to see how easy it would be to bring in some artwork for a V-carve. Amazingly fast and simple. Import my .SVG and apply the V-carve bit and there it was… a crisp, clean version on the virtual board… With Carvewright you either need a number of add-ons where you trace ( i.e. draw everything again ) within designer, apply profiles to achieve “close but not perfect” depth changes or you go through a process of importing the artwork as a font glyph and then type the associated font glyphs onto your virtual board. The process provides decent results but far… FAR from the crisp and very clean looking results that Easel gave me. There sound like there is another way to use the DXF importer for Carvewright but I am not willing to spend all the money just to find out it’s more of a hassle and the resulting carves are still just decent.
Here is the same image on the Carvewright Designer virtual board. This was first imported to a font image scanner. Then placed into a font as a glyph, exported out to my Mac font folder and then brought into Carvewright by typing the corresponding keystroke where the image was stored. It works but you can see the quality is not nearly as nice.
