In the market. Is everyone impressed overall?

Onefinity is in the preorder stage. It’s not a proven machine. I did a similar thing 12-13 years ago with a cnc company and I was lucky ( or unlucky) to get my machine. Others did not and the guy took off with the money. About $4k each. I’ve also purchased other woodworking machines from new and established companies that went belly up, making the machines with proprietary parts kind of hard to maintain. The X carve has a track record and parts available from many units sold and that is a big plus. Even if they discontinued it for a new design, the open source nature of it would allow you to go on and maintain it.

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But I want to! actually someone asked me to machine 6L-4V Ti on my Tormach for a demo. I looked up the price of Ti and want "uh, no, I will machine some 7075 or 4041 for you but that’s about it). Unless you are buying some tiny piece of inconel (like dice size) it would cost more than the X-Carve…

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I mean, at some point in time before the heat-death of the universe the machine will become. “obsolete” in the sense the company could go under or something. But let’s be honest then only part that isn’t completely off the shelf is the X-Controller, but otherwise it’s a few stepper motors and a Dewalt router, so if the x-controller became unsupported any other CNC controller would run this thing/ They’ve had great support over the years (I have a 2015 model) and given the openness of the community mods are pretty easy to come by. Tiny changes have made somethings harder to upgrade (like the drag chain mounts are slightly different now - god I wish I had that nice openable drag chain). I added the electronic z-probing to my 2015 model (again because it is all super open). The software, while closed, is hardly unique (any CAM should work in theory - and Fusion has the post-processor directly so works really well).

This is of course a hobbyist/prosumer level milling machine, so you aren’t going to get the kind of support you would demand from a DMG Mori 5-axis mill (which costs and wieghs like your house) but they are always responsive and continue to create mods for the older machines (I haven’t bitten on the thick x-bar since I did the stiffening mod back in '16), although I am thinking of doing the CNC4NEWBIE stepper upgrade and z-axis upgrade.

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Great Machine, comprehensive on-line instructions to build it, What you plan on doing with your machine it should do just fine, Bought me one a few months ago, I have the Xcarve 1000, for me it was just a matter of getting the right type of bits and figuring a few things out with software and setting up things in easel, other than that I have no beef about this machine whatsoever nor do I have any beef with the inventables staff, anyone I’ve ever Had to talk too there has been excellent! Very friendly and will absolutely help solve your problems if the forum can’t :wink: 5 star company!

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I bought an X-carve in 2017 (my first CNC machine :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:) knowing absolutely nothing about cnc or even cad. But I dove in and have run the machine like crazy. I think if you’re fairly mechanically aware, keep the machine in good shape and keep the v wheels and tracks clean the thing will just keep running. The only thing I’ve genuinely had go bad is the Z axis acme rod bearing, and probably from excessive use and lots of drilling operations. (super easy fix by the way). and a little tangent here there is a lot of gripe about the z axis wheels but keep in mind the DWP611 has some non zero axial and radial movement…

I only run mine on G-code and doing so has mega helped me level up my skills. When I started I didn’t even know what G-code was but now I teach CNC machining at a local community college. Teaching allowed me to be the person who spec’d tools and work holding and set up/commissioned a new Haas Mini Mill. Transitioning from an x-carve to a Haas mill was actually frighteningly easy.

I recently purchased a Haas TM-3P toolroom mill for myself and am now running my self through lots of different set ups and learning how to optimize my tool management, offsets, cutting parameters and strategies like thread milling and 4th axis etc. And even though I have, what to me seems like the Saturn V of CNC machines in my shop I still use my x-carve quite a bit. There are some things that are just way easier and faster on and x-carve.

Long story short my 1000mm x-carve has had a massive impact on who I am and the course of my life and I am extremely grateful.

If there is interest I could make a post about transitioning from an X-carve to a Haas and some of the things I encountered along the way. Or if you have some specific questions message me.

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Seems like every time I go to carve – which isn’t very frequent, I might use it once every few months. Something needs to be fiddled with. My opinion is to test a smaller cut BEFORE you make your final cut . When I bought mine there was no dust control – invest in this – dust gets EVERYWHERE!! Other tip I’d suggest is to look up a X86 Single board computer (SBC) like the atomic pi, or the Odroid. These will run the Linux Easel driver without modification, but if you’re more technically proficient Samy Kamkar (search it on github) has a way to install the Easel Driver on Raspberry pi. Why? For less than $50 I can have a cheap linux system hooked to my XCarve. What I do is design everything in easel on my main computer, save teh easel desigh. I then use a remote desktop on my ipad to connect to the SBC connected to my XCarve, setup my cut at the XCarve, and let it finish remotely.

I do something similar (bought a small cheap fanless VESA mountable Ryzen based x86 mini-PC (never got the RPi driver to work reliably) running Ubuntu. It’s such an improvement to not have my mac laptop next to the X-carve. I made my own VESA mount to mount on top of the VESA mount that the monitor attaches to the arm I got at Monoprice above the X-carve. I want to add a webcam onto the PC and stream it via FFMPEG so I can watch the X-carve like I do on my 3D printers with Octoprint on my RPis.

Even though I bought the X-carve years before my Tormach, I honestly made the reverse transition ,as I never really got the X-carve running until this year (pandemic gave me more time to get it all ready and running). When I am hogging metal, that is on the tormach, but when I want to go big it’s the x-carve. But running a full CNC milling machine definitely made me understand the X-carve way better.

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