Re: Personal Fabrication Tools
 

Only tangentially related to this thread, but I've been eyeing the chinese line of 3040 (and larger) routers for a while.

Their quality is all over the place, but some vendors like www.omiocnc.com put together some very nice packages (with HG20 rails versus round rails) at a price that's very affordable for FRC teams.

I've been tempted to buy one for myself and/or 973, but we already have too many machines.

For a team w/o a router and a limited budget, their performance blows away shapeko or X-carves for sure. Not even comparable. You're able to cut aluminum with these at a rate that is fast enough for FRC production (our router was limping this season, and was barely able to cut faster than these machines can and we still made a boatload of parts).

Re: Personal Fabrication Tools
 

We met a little over 3 months ago. For much better reasons than her tolerance of the literal 'junk in my trunk', we have been strongly considering tying the knot. No worries though there will not be early arrival of additional JR-FLL members ;). I am very process oriented :D.

Re: Personal Fabrication Tools
 

Interesting. I'd heard a bunch of mixed reviews on the 3040 style machines over the last couple years and most of that came from the lackluster electronics driving them. [1] Most folks I've seen tended to swap out the entire brains, these seem to come with at least more than "requires a parallel port".

If you decide to pull the trigger I hope to see a good review. If not, maybe I con convince a local hackerspace that $1000 is not a terrible idea to get a piece of smaller equipment.



[1] This seems to be the vibe I get on a lot of the lower end stuff is the electronics are a essentially Woot BoC levels, sometimes great sometimes they explode when power is applied.