I took some great photos with it and was deep into photography for quite a while. I have a fancy Nikon and a bunch of expensive glass (that’d be lenses) to prove it. I went through the Uber-Camera face back in SLR days. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t go with a much fancier DSLR? The A5100 is still extremely well reviewed and very reasonably price–$548 with 15-50 zoom lens as I write this. A more modern equivalent would be the Sony A5100: It’s no longer the latest thing, but when I got mine about 3 years ago it was very well reviewed. I’m using a Sony Nex 5t mirrorless camera, which I really like. I’m building the Shapeoko on our dining room table (my wife indulges my odd habits), so I set up a tripod so I can run the camera from the same place each session. I’ve always loved them as they’re unusual and they do a good job of speeding you through something in an interesting way.Ī time-lapse video is a series of still shots taken at a fixed interval and usually from a fixed location. I’ll be detailing the build with a series of time-lapse videos. Check out this crazy rubberband gun project:Ĭ’mon, if you make something that cool on a Shapeoko, it must be a pretty darned good machine, right? Check it out for even more ideas, but here’s one of the most amazing. Speaking of projects, I wrote an article that gives a lot of great examples of what’s possible with a Shapeoko CNC Router. Great value for the price–easy on my budget!.A CNC Router Kit can be built pretty quickly in my spare time.Great performance and work envelope in a hobby class machine.In the end, this machine killed 3 birds with 1 stone: The Shapeoko XXL is reasonably rigid for a hobby machine and has a large enough envelope for the projects I have in mind. A full-sized router would be more like 1000 to 1500 lbs for a beefy rigid machine, but there’s no way I have room for that. I picked the XXL model, which has a large work envelope– 33″(X), 17″(Y), 3″(Z). I think that’s what it would take to seriously outperform the Shapeoko. My other problem is I don’t really have room for a full-sized 4′ x 8′ CNC Router. For a guy like me who complains he’s too busy, and a guy who knows first hand when you design it yourself version 1.0 is always full of things you wish you’d done differently, the Shapeoko was the perfect choice. That means it goes together easily and it performs well once you have it built. It’s been through a ton of upgrades over the years and is nearly perfect. Their Shapeoko CNC Router Kit is no exception. And they study every CNC machine they can get their hands on to make sure no competitor beats them. I’ve met the Carbide3D guys on a number of occassions, and they are engineer’s engineers. Here’s another thing–the Shapeoko is the product of lots of iterative engineering and updates. So, a DIY CNC Router Kit was a good answer–much shorter build time as well as lower cost than finished CNC Router. I don’t want to take a year or two building the machine–I want to get it done and do some nifty cnc router projects with it!īut, I didn’t want to just get a finished CNC Router either. These days, CNCCookbook has grown considerably and I have even less spare time for a big project. As I was preparing to embark on a spindle upgrade plus tool changer, and bought a Tormach spindle cartridge for the project, I realized I would save a huge amount of time and be making parts sooner if I sold my existing mill and bought a Tormach. Plus, I spent about $6500 on it, all told. I spent close to 2 years doing nothing but working on that mill in my spare time. It was a full-on effort with servos, powered drawbar, way oilers, flood enclosure, and many more mods. I’ve done a DIY CNC mill project: I converted an RF-45 to CNC. While it’s certainly possible to build a big honking DIY CNC Router from scratch, it’s a huge amount of work. Why not do a DIY CNC Router from scratch that’s much more capable than a Shapeoko? I knew people really love their Shapeokos! The short answer is the Shapeoko has a killer price performance ratio–it offers big value for the money.Ĭarbide3D / Shapeoko (Carbide3D is the company and Shapeoko is their product) absolutely rocked the Customer Satisfaction scores for two years running in our CNC Router Survey. Why the Shapeoko and not some other DIY CNC Router? Why not build a killer DIY CNC Router from scratch? Why a CNC Router Kit? We needed to get an entry-level CNC in, it’ll be the precursor for more project videos done with the router, and I wanted to get a CNC Router in-house as well. I’ve wanted to do a video project series for a while and decided building a Shapeoko CNC Router Kit was the right one.
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