Couple of random things first. I have talked to a couple of the company guys in person while they were at the woodworking show.


You can download the software from the site and play with it. It's not bad and has some things that regular cad programs need but it does lack regular cad funcions and is awkward for me to use compared to autocad.

You cannot import DXF files. You can import picture files and trace them. They will be incorporating that in the future.

To cut balsa sheet you are going to have to put it on a piece of foam because of the minimum thickness the machine accepts. I don't know how much downforce the rollers apply so I don't know if it'll crush the wood or not. Basically it's a planer that has been converted to a CNC. Not a bad idea and one that I wondered about too.

The drive belts on the bottom look to be 120 -150 grit sandpaper. Typical with home size drumsander drive belts and works well.

Many of the units in customers hands you hear about are the beta versions.

If you belong to the craftsman club it's on sale for $1600 usually.


There is a digitizer for it and it's not super fast but it's not too slow either. Accuracy is very good IMO and you can adjust accuracy just like a printer. Less accurate it goes faster.


If you want one buy it from Sears as the price is better and they are getting the first several shipments. The company us using Sears to get them started and they hope to build a more HD machine.


Their bits are somewhat proprietary but you can use regular bits.

Right now their main market is in creating carved reliefs to mimmick hand carved. From talking to the guys they really don't know who to build it for. They didn't have a clue about using it for making model plane parts or similar applications.



I built a home made cnc router a while back and sold it. I started building another but haven't found a deal on steppers and a controller for it. It's built just needs the mechanicals to make it go. It's nothing special but it works great for model plane parts and it's cheap. Yeah it has drawbacks but oh well. It's the phoenix on www.crankorgan.com.
I do like some things about the compucarve but right now it's still better to build your own.