Name and possible contact

What CNC router/mill do you have?

Would you recommend this machine?

What is your setup, in terms of tooling, or any modifications you've made to the machine?

What CAM software do you use?

What was the approximate cost of the machine?

What type of materials do you usually use it for?

Provide a link to a product page

Yeah it's good for 2d plate aluminum

Torchmate vmd provided software

Solomon Greenberg solomongreenberg@gmail.com

Openbuilds C-Beam Machine XL Router, 30"x13"

Very good for the money. It can do wood and aluminum like nobody's business. Biggest problem I can think of is the fact that you have to do routine maintenance because of the T-slots. I'd probably recommend it over a Shapeoko --- it's cheaper, as capable, and has roughly the same cutting area.

Dewalt 611 spindle, carbide O-flute endmills, 1/8 or 1/4 length usually

Autodesk Inventor HSM Ultimate

$1400 for machine + spindle + electronics, tooling is $30/endmill (Onsrud from Amazon)

1/16"-1/4" 6061 aluminum, polycarb

http://openbuildspartstore.com/c-beam-machine-xlarge-mechanical-bundle/

Fantastic for teaching students. It is a proper milling machine that allows us to do any operation we could on a manual mill and more (such as geometric curved in both 2d and 3d space). We've milled plastic, wood, foam, aluminum, steel and more with this machine. Would highly recommend to anyone looking for a CNC mill (note the word mill). We currently have 2 (1st and 3rd gen) and could not be happier with the product. We would not be nearly as competitive as we are without these.

Stock with tormach enclosure. Plan on adding an ATC and 4th axis this summer. Assorted cutters ranging from 1/16-1/2 in 1/16 incriminates.

HSMWorks and Mastercam X4

20000 for the machine with enclosure

Anything as tough as steel billets (toughest we've tried). Vary your speeds/feeds depending on size of stock and you can mill pretty much anything.

https://www.tormach.com/store/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=PCNC1100

Once you've learnt the basics of CNC milling, look into dynamic milling (an option with HSMworks). It makes milling so much easier and less time consuming. It also prolongs bit life and to top it off, looks pretty cool too.

Tormach PCNC 440 10x10x6.5

Yes, it's been very useful but as our team has had it less than a year, we are still working on integrating it into our work and are still training members on how and when to use it.

Very minimal and basic tooling

Yes. Used it to make the entirety of a swerve drivetrain in the offseason, works good on aluminum, mostly sheet, also works well for tubestock. Could make whatever our sponsor's waterjet does more accurately but slower. Very rigid- able to remove 3in^3/min using a 1/2" endmill

Built a table for it (email for CAD) with a monitor arm, Added a Bijur mister, plan on adding a VFD spindle, maybe upgrading to clearpath stepper killers, use 1/4in O-flute endmills, screw machine drill bits

HSMworks (free for FIRST/students) DO NOT get ArtCAM included-waste of money

Up to 1/4in aluminum, MDF

http://www.veloxcncrouters.com/5050-cnc-router-4x4

Order early, they take forever to ship/build

Allen Gregory (allengregoryiv)

It takes some work to get it working well. You need to add some features, etc but we have it cutting parts for us and it is one of the most inexpensive routers you can buy. We wanted something that could 36" or longer parts and this does it well.

Added, air blast, vacuum, cable track, emergency stop, side shields. We use single flute cutters from Zoro.com

5052 aluminum, polycarb, Delrin, and, etc

Most of our production aluminum parts our laser cut by our sponsors the router is mostly for prototyping and our polycarb parts.

F1 in school cars for Sesmic Racing, and 3 more teams, and keychains have both been made with success. Will be making a post soon™

Stock everything, double sided m3 tape from KOP

Would like help on what bit to use for sheet metal.

X-Carve - 1000mm x 1000mm

Depends on what you're using it for. On the one hand, it has a huge work area and it's dirt cheap (compared to other CNC routers of similar size), but you do loose some accuracy because of this. While the X-Carve does a good job of making basic cuts on plastic, it struggles with maintaining accuracy on bearing pockets which limits its usefulness. Also, though it can, technically, cut aluminum, you have to run the feed-rates extremely slow and use cutting fluid (which, incidentally, will stain the waste board).

The other main thing to be aware of is it's not very fault-tolerant, bumping the machine or getting a small piece of debris in the track can throw off the entire job. It also requires a VERY flat table as the frame is not the most ridged (though if you account for this in CAM settings you can work-around it to an extent). We considered modifying it to use string potentiometers to create a sort of pseudo-closed loop control system to correct some of these issues but never got around to it.

Overall I look at it as a time-saver, if you're limited on manpower, it's great to just be able to stick a sheet of material in it and let it run while you do something else, and if you have the equipment to true-up the holes when it's done, you can make some fairly decent parts in a fraction of the time it would manually on a mill (especially because there's less prep required to start cutting than on a mill). That said, if I could go back in time and if I'd had a bigger budget I would have gotten something high-end.


tl;dr: If you're poor, you can make the X-Carve work, but if you've got $10k+ to drop on a machine, get something better.

The main modifications we made were adding a 3D printed dust shoe, and foamboard dust guards to help prevent dust from getting on the tracks. We also added a cheap AC relay that allows the controller to toggle the spindle and shop vac on/off so we can leave it on long jobs and not worry about it running all night long.

Inventor HSM (Free student edition, works great too)

The one we got was about $1600 on sale, the newer version retails for roughly $1800 with all the tooling.

Mainly we use it for cutting polycarbonate, though we have done 1/4" thick aluminum gearbox plates (though the bearing holes needed to be cleaned up on a mill)

https://www.inventables.com/technologies/x-carve/

Definitely yes! I have run CNC mills for over 30 years and the Tormach mill is absolutely the best for a machine less that $20K. It even can spar up against $100K machines.