Woodworker's Journal 2009-33-4, страница 39

Ready for your home shop?

Today's Shop

Then along came desktop CNC routers. They cost way more than top-of-the-line router tables, but half what low-end ShopBots do. So now, you can buy a turn-key package, bolt the parts together in an hour or so, load a program into your home computer and, by the end of the day, start doing some real CNC woodworking.

For this article, I've got a pair of CNC routers in my basement shop. Neither can slice a plywood sheet into cabinet parts, but either can cut small parts — drawer fronts, for example, or door panels — complete with joinery cuts, profiling and decorative carving. Either will mill a rough board smooth or texture a smooth board to make it rough. Where both excel is in making signs and relief carvings. One machine is the CarveWright, made by LHR Technologies (sold by Sears as the CompuCarve). The other is the CNC Shark, made by Next Wave Automation and sold exclusively by Rockier (rockler.com).

The CarveWright costs about $1,900, the Shark about $2,400. Both are categorized as desktop CNCs, because of their size and limited working area. They are pretty easy to use, have many practical applications and are reasonably affordable. But before I get into the particulars of these machines, let me give you some background.

As you would suspect, the CarveWright and the CNC Shark are much less sophisticated versions of those monstrous CNC (Computer Numeric Control)

By Bill Hylton

About seven years ago, I spent a few days at a big woodworking show in Atlanta, where I was mesmerized by the CNC machines. Full sheets of plywood would slide in one end and cabinet parts — complete with joinery cuts, holes for shelving pins, pilots for mounting screws and even decorative grooving — would emerge on the other. Of course, many of the machines were bigger than my shop and cost more than my house. Over time, however, I've found some manufacturers, notably ShopBot, making

Now intricate carving is available in home-shop sized CNC routing machines. Is this part of the future for the hobbyist woodworker?

downsized machines. The cost of even these smaller machines, though, was still out of my reach.

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August 2009 Woodworker's Journal