My experience is with a ShopSabre PRO 404 rather than a 23, but most of the same decisions apply. I ordered it in November 2022, and had it up and running by February. Lots of compressed learning during build season.
Regarding your inclination toward a CNC router before a CNC mill, I made the same choice based on extensive Chief Delphi reading, and it has served our team extremely well. Given a large team, large budget, and deep institutional knowledge, both would be useful, but the router can do most of the important mill work, whereas the converse does not hold.
Regarding support, I have read a few anecdotes of teams hitting dead ends with ShopSabre support in diagnosing/repairing faulty hardware, where the only remaining option was to pay for an expensive on-site technician visit. I haven’t had any hardware failures, so I can’t speak to that. But I have had quite a lot of interaction with technical support for the control software (some detailed questions, some configuration problems, some configuration enhancements), and in every case I was actually surprised by how good the support was. This was no fluke; I dealt with at least three different people while getting up to speed.
Regarding space, I was surprised by how large the effective footprint is, once accounting for access to the various parts of the machine. I had imagined building an enclosure to keep aluminum chips contained, but it quickly became apparent that an enclosure would have to be huge to serve that purpose and allow convenient machine access. I punted, and we just deal with the cleanup implications.
Now for low-utility machine options. I agonized over a few options that I ultimately left off: vacuum table, tool changer, retracting locator pins. I only miss the tool changer sometimes, but its absence had the benefit of forcing us to embrace batching to reduce tool changes. The vacuum table and locator pins would be useful for a production shop processing sheet goods, but they are of so little use for FRC, that if I were to do things over, I’d probably omit them even if they were free.
The options I’m super glad to have: mister, phenolic table with T-slots, “material thickness calibration touchpad” (for quickly and accurately setting Z), dust skirt, control pendant. A couple of caveats are in order though. The phenolic table is great because it isn’t damaged by the mister like MDF is; we mostly use a bespoke MDF spoil board on top of the phenolic surface and fly cut it often to counteract swelling due to coolant damage. If you aren’t using a mister, you can probably get away with an MDF top. Also, although it’s possible to use the mister with a smaller air compressor than specified, I upgraded this summer and am getting better cooling and chip clearing now. As for dust collection, I already had a large dust collector; for FRC-specific use I wouldn’t bother with a dust collector, and would just use a good shop vac for wood jobs (fly cutting being the one thing that would make me wish for a dust collector).
Ah, and tooling. It is crazy how deep that rabbit hole goes. For fixtures, we rely almost exclusively on screwing into the spoil board, either through 1/4" plywood rectangles as sprung hold-downs, or through holes drilled in aluminum/plastic/wood. When access to the entire work piece is required, we use the blue masking tape plus CA glue approach (one layer of tape on the table, one layer on the work piece, CA glue binding the tape layers together). When it’s important to flip a piece over and carefully match front/back features, we use locator pins (wood dowels, brass rods, or Delrin rods). For bits, we use uncoated solid carbide flat endmills. There are single-flute endmills specifically designed for aluminum and other single-flute endmills for plastic. We use those to good effect, with the mister running. We haven’t used wood very much since we gained the ability to rout aluminum, polycarbonate, Delrin, etc. We mainly use 1/4" and 1/8" diameter; 1/2" only comes into play when removing large amounts of material.
One more thought on end mills: Expect to break several each time you approach a new-to-you technique (applies especially to 1/8" and smaller). You will get over most of the general beginner mistakes after breaking the first ten or so, but every material and type of operation has its own challenges.
