My wife and I run a small wood working business and we cut many shapes, including 6" tall letters and animal shapes, from 1" hardwoods like maple and black walnut. Would the X-Carve be able to cut such shapes from these hardwoods and would it do it in a reasonable amount of time?
I run primarily hardwood and other than the dreaded stock spindle issues, I had no trouble with it.
I would suggest that you go with a quiet cut spindle upgrade if you are just first ordering and plan on some stiffening mods that you can find here on the forum. The stiffening/rigidity mods are more helpful on the 1000mm machine due to the spans involved but would probably benefit the 500mm as well to a lesser extent.
These are open source machines and as such making mods to suit a particular purpose is not unusual and in fact is encouraged.
Thanks for the responds Jk. Are you completely cutting out shapes or just carving them? What spindle would you recommend? Which is the most powerful? I included one of the products that we make from maple. We cut the piece into three separate shapes and drill candle holes. Could that all be done with the X-Carve?
Yep, you could do all of these pretty easily with X-Carve. Have you checked out the free software Easel? Try playing around with that, I bet you could produce these designs within a few minutes.
If you are an experienced wood worker, then, in my opinion, I strongly suggest looking at a router mount. I used the stock spindle, then upgraded to a 600 watt spindle, and have now upgraded again to a router. Cutting 1" thick hardwood would be downright painful with the current spindle offering. Probably 15-20 passes at around .05" per pass.
The Dewalt mount looks promising and is available in the store. You would probably also have to look at some of the rigidity mods - very easy to accomplish. With my Hitachi router, I couldn’t be happier with the machine and NOW could easily cut these parts but definitely not with the stock offering.