Hello everyone,
I recently retired and want to find a hobby away from electronics and their chat boards. What is the opinion of those of you that have tried the CarveWright. Is this tool as good as it seems on the surface?
Temecula CA.USA
While I've not used one, I have read many reviews and feedabacks about the system. It's the same system that Sears rebranded for themselves (through a deal)
On to what I know. It's basicly taking Printer technology and applying it to wood carving. I know it's really a CNC machine but bear with me. You slide in a piece of wood and it starts from one end to the other carving the design you programmed into a memory card with your computer. The software makes defining the carving path seamless.
The Carvewright system does have another advantage over home built machine. They have incorporated a zeroing system for height. (z axis) that does it automaticly when you insert the wood.
Downsides. Limited feed width and thickness. You can't put too large a project piece in it. And cost. You're paying a lot for it.
Options
If you don't mind getting your hands a little bit dirty in electronics you could take a look at"
Downside for this is that it takes more monkeying around with software and programing the carving path. And your computer would have to be fairly close to the machine.
I have heard complaints about defective units and problems like that. but the one thing is it is slow. one guy that likes his showed some pics and said it was faster to cut the shape out (after 3d cutting) with a router and template then the 1.5 hours it would take on the carvewright. my cnc machine would have done it in just a few minutes. myself I want versatility with my machine and the carvewright is pretty limited for a cnc machine.
I havew not used the machine but I had an extensive demo at the AWFS show in Vegas earlier this year. I think for the price it is a fantastic machine. I would love to have one. You'll need just a little bit of computer savy to run the software but it was actually very easy looking. It can also trace existing designs and then reproduce them. You can likely also use it to do negative and positive cutouts for nice inlay work.
I spoke with the product manager and he was very open about the limitations and didn't try to oversell it. He did say it wasn't up to snuff to be in a production environment running all day everyday and proabably just had a few thousand hours of operation before it would need some rebuilding. But they use very quality components (for the price range) and sounded like they would be very available for support help, etc. Really dedicated folks.
I think you could easily get some carving work from local cabinet shops that wanted to have doors customized with wheat stocks, grapes or other standard patterns and have lots of fun on many various projects.
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