Smart Saw

[woodturner]

The sponsored ad that popped up this morning was for the "Smart Saw", seems to be a $500 DIY CNC with reasonable capacity. http://www.diysmartsaw.com/

Has anyone looked into this, and if so, what did you think?

Thanks.

wt

[capncarl]

I think it is the first step down the slippery slope of CNCs. The neighbor behind me has a couple of home made cncs. They are amazing. His for sale version is somewhat smaller than the smart saw so it's size limits it greatly. His shop model is possibly simular size as the smart saw. The big negative I see is its ability to cut real wood. Most of what my neighbor cuts is mdf. The real wood I see them using makes them slow the feed rate way down. Lots of tear outs. Maybe it is the bits they use? Just my observations.

it looks like a good suggestion for Poolhound to use on his box building though!

[tfischer]

Seen it before... seems a little to scammy to me, with vibes of "Ted's Woodworking Plans". A little (ok a lot) too much spiel for me.

Plus I bristle at calling a CNC router a "saw" lol.

[JoeyGee]

Seen it before... seems a little to scammy to me, with vibes of "Ted's Woodworking Plans". A little (ok a lot) too much spiel for me.

Plus I bristle at calling a CNC router a "saw" lol.

That was my reaction, too. I did not get a good feeling about the site.

I'm intrigued by CNC's. A couple years ago they were all the rage on YouTube, with Inventables giving away a lot of them to some of the top YouTube creators. Beyond the initial excitement, i haven't seen them used much. Occasionally some will make jig parts with them or the occasional sign project, but not nearly as much as i thought I'd see.

Frank Horwath seems to be the exception. He's doing some cool CNC stuff.

[tfischer]

I'm intrigued by CNC's. A couple years ago they were all the rage on YouTube, with Inventables giving away a lot of them to some of the top YouTube creators. Beyond the initial excitement, i haven't seen them used much. Occasionally some will make jig parts with them or the occasional sign project, but not nearly as much as i thought I'd see.

My thoughts on this is that the average woodworker, at least the ones who are active on the internet, seems to prefer tradition to technology. We highly respect the guy who has a huge collection of hand planes and uses them exclusively to mill his lumber. We lambast Norm Abrams for using biscuits and brad nails. We gloat over hand-cut dovetails.

When we had our kitchen remodeled a few years back we used a small custom cabinet shop. I was excited to get a tour of their workshop, but was surprised by what I saw... they had a row of table saws, and a huge CNC milling machine. That was about it. Basically they would rip down the sheet goods to rough size, lay things out on the CNC mill, and the CAD plans from the front office were downloaded right into the machine and it did its thing. Then off to the side were a series of assembly tables and of course a separate finish area. But all the grunt work happened on the CNC mill.

I think part of the problem with consumer-grade CNC is the size of the bed. That's why I'm excited about the Shaper Origin... a "handheld" CNC solution that is essentially an auto-tracking/auto-correcting router. It's not cheap either... but after studying up on it for several months, I finally pulled the trigger on a pre-order. Mine will arrive this fall and I'm excited to try it out. (If anyone wants, I have a referral code that can save you $100 if you do a pre-order on a Shaper, just PM me).

-Tim