I’m curious what you guys consider to be appropriate lengths of time for carves based on standard x-carve equipment. I kind of have the opinion that yeah, the Dewalt should last for a few hundred hours of total run time before it needs to be taken to the farm, but how does that affect the lengths of time that you all allow a single project to carve, or do you even let that be an issue of consideration? We just replaced our brushes maybe 15 carving hours ago, but I don’t know how many hours they last so that is also something that I consider with how long I want a carve to be.
My wife and I do a lot of custom wall signs for customers and in general our signs tend to be about 2-hour carves. If a project is going well north of that, I’ll tend to either try removing some of the detail, or if that doesn’t do much, I may look at using an alternate design that isn’t as detailed so that we can cut down the actual machine-use time. A friend of mine had asked about me doing a map from the video game Skyrim for them, but it’s so detailed that it was between 9 and 11 hours and I was worried about having the machine running for that long of a time period, especially if we weren’t going to be around for a while.