I really think a diamond drag device in a CNC would work just fine, I just have not tried it yet. They’re on ebay for $50 or so.
I fully agree that Roland is WAY overpriced for what I use it for. I guess it is priced and engineered for an engraving shop rather than hobby use. I purchased mine off ebay for a lot less.
I have a 1000mm X-Carve along with the Glowforge. The X-Carve is better suited for larger projects or thicker materials.
I have an X-Carve 1000 alongside the glowforge pro as well (note the work area is not 1000mm, more like 30"x30"). I also once had a Nomad 883 but the 8"x8" build area wasn’t very useful. It was good for high detail on small projects because it was very rigid but I found that large projects were far too common. The main benefits of also having the X-Carve I would say are the larger and thicker material and being able to cut material that is either unsafe to laser or doesn’t laser cut cleanly.
I have an X-Carve right next to my Glowforge. Haven’t used it in years now. It’s just too fussy to fixture things, super noisy and messy, and I never really found a project for it. I suspect if I did power it up, I’d need to spend the weekend tensioning the belts and whatever else has gone out of whack while it’s sat there.
Yeah, mine is basically idle. I added a dust shoe (the 3D printed one with a bush border from McMaster) through a cyclonic dust separator, otherwise it’s basically useless as it filled the room with wood chips. Also added a SuperPID to the motor to be able to precisely control speed (it’s a pretty clever mechanism)
I’ve had my X-Carve for a while. I don’t run it in the same room as the GF as I’m way too worried about dust.
As mentioned the strength of the X-Carve is for larger projects and thicker woods. I do a lot of wall display stuff on the X-Carve (mostly art pieces) as it’s easy to do a 2’x3’ picture. We’re currently working on a huge piece that uses tongue and groove pine salvaged from a renovation in the house. That said, it’s very noisy, extremely messy, and much more complex to set up carves for. If you use their online carvings software you can do some things but virtually everyone I know that is using it for serious carving uses a program like Aspire to actually create their projects.
Anyway, it’s a great tool but very, very different from the GF.
My X-Carve experience reminds me of what my Dad used to say about when he had a house boat - “A man’s happiest 2 days are the day he buys a boat, and the day he sells that boat.” I was excited to get the X-Carve, and even more excited to sell it. (but it WAS a lot of fun to assemble!)
I got my X-Carve on Friday, assembled it on Saturday, and started running things yesterday. I’m actually loving it!
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