Rusty that is super cool! I can see that’s going to be a challenge. Letting people know that we can do that type of work. I was also thinking about cake toppers
like this one.
Ya for sure! Those are awesome! We actually did do a cake topper for the same friends wedding, it said “I love you, I know” (how can you tell they are big movie nerds!). It went great, it would have been better if I used better material though. I had used a plastic server tray since it was last minute and the plastic was actually a brittle resin! I worked alright, got some photos, but definitely wouldn’t last!
wont have any in the shop till this weekend for a photo but they are old weathered barn wood cut to various sizes like 5x10 with just text cut into them such as words like faith happiness hope welcome. some will have bible verses or sayings also some with silhouettes of holiday stuff like pumpkins bats cats x-mas trees with happy holidays. all things that can be cut quickly. also do stuff for weddings seems like old and dirty wood sells better
Rusty
You forgot to dot your i 
Dave
There’s always the Mitchell Dillman approach:
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Like @DanBrown above me, I didn’t make a business purely out of the x-carve. For about 2 years now my brother and I have been custom anodizing paintball guns. We had the idea of making our own parts out of aluminum and then anodizing them.
We started out very small, since this was our first foray into CNC in general. After about a month of learning CAD, CAM and how they apply to aluminum on the X-Carve, we were making parts to sell! Its been about 4 or 5 months now and we are consistently selling parts. Our “bread and butter” parts are triggerplates for autococker paintball guns (a fairly “classic” type of paintball gun, where parts can be rare). These parts are simple 2.5D cutouts that we tumble then anodize then sell on ebay/facebook/paintball forums. We are looking into working with paintball part websites so we can start wholesaling them out 20-100 at a time.
We’ve been reinvesting a lot of the profits back into the X-Carve. Upgrading the spindle, stiffening the axis, buying better endmills, etc. Looking back on some of the first parts we were selling they were fairly low quality, and we did a lot of hand filing to get them acceptable. After these upgrades though we are cranking out parts faster and much higher quality, which means less hand work afterwords.
I think doing our own in-house anodizing is the only reason this is working. In the paintball scene, you’ll be hard pressed to sell aluminum parts that aren’t anodized and outsourcing that stuff is expensive. Here are some pics of the run I did over the weekend.
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lol I knew someone would notice! I cut it out, but the people decorating decided to not use it, to each their own.
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No disintegrations?
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Lord Vader complains about those…
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was hoping someone would get that haha
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I’m in the planning stages for starting a small biz with the X-Carve.
I’ve got a couple of people that are waiting for me to get fully set up & running, and then I’ll be a busy guy!
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Mitchell Dillman. I liked that! This is how i envisioned x carving. Am i correct that he set z axis with a wrench?? I sort of like that idea for a gentle zero, I’d be concerned it may hurt stepper motors after awhile though? I also realized Ive been overlooking the Apps portion of Easel. Going out to the shed to play around!!
Here’s another business that was recently launched with Easel and X-Carve - Apple TV Remote Stand | Studio Neat
They have been really successful so far. They do a really nice job marketing and telling the story and they are manufacturing the product all by themselves.
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Im making some returns already with my x carve. Material x2 has been my price structure so far. Pretty easy side money. Signs… 40$… acrylic led signs 60$… i heart my xcarve.
Im wanting to but cant get it to cut even close to spec. Im thinking of getting something more than a hobby machine. The wasted hours adjusting, upgrading, adding bracing, stiffening the x and y axis, dewalt spindle, testing could have been spent making things to sell.
Ive spent 14 hours the past 2 days trying to get it to cut better than .024 out of spec.
I use the X-Carve all the time in my woodworking business. Some projects I use the X-Carve to cut out small parts like the stars to my American Flag Coin Rack, while other projects like the Team RWB plaques have a little more involved milling. I would say that the X-Carve has more than payed for itself including money and time spent.
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I’m shortly (with any luck) going to be adding a laser to my plans. With a laser and the X-Carve, I’m seeing some SERIOUS collaborations being possible. 
I am working on adding a laser to my X-Carve also!
Very nice! I considered adding one to my X-Carve for a bit, but the capabilities of the low-power diode-type lasers available are just not really sufficient for what I want to do. I’m looking at an Epilog unit, probably a Mini-18.
