I’ve been following the Maslow CNC team for a while now, and I’m psyched to finally start building my own, probably the Maslow 4, in my garage. I’m mainly into cabinet-making and prototyping. Maslow’s large-format yet compact design is perfect for me, especially since I’m tight on space. I know Maslow’s had some flak for its tolerance/precision issues, but that’s not a big deal for my large projects.
Now, with the Maslow 4 rolling out, I’m curious if it’s up for more detailed, high-precision work. I haven’t seen many intricate projects done with the older models, but I hear the new Maslow has improved precision, around ±0.5mm. Sounds like it could be a game-changer for detailed work, right? So, I’m wondering, have any of you done more detailed projects on the older Maslows? And do you think the Maslow 4 will be better for intricate designs?
We just cut out this world map yesterday which is pretty detailed.
The real limiting factor is the size of the router bit. Since the bit that is doing the cutting is 1/8th inch in diameter you are never really going to get the kind of detail that you wold with say a laser cutter
what is your definition of ‘high precision work’ If you are looking for
1/10,000 inch, the maslow will never come close to doing that (and most machine
tools won’t, only the really expensive ones will)
the maslow is aiming for the ballpark of 1-2/100 inch
I have a Makermade M2, and I have made some pretty intricate things with it. The machine is capable of doing amazing things that I didn’t think it could be accurate enough to do, but it does.
I consider this simple sugar skull to be intricate just because of its size. It is impressive to me because it is multiple passes to get to the depth, and the entire finished piece fits easily into my hand as you can see. That is accurate enough for me.
These would both look better if they were done on better quality wood, but that isn’t the point.
I did both of these examples with a Dewalt 611 attached to a sled that hangs on two bicycle chains. Is it as hokey and useless as it seems? Hell, no. I have been impressed with what it can do.
Yes, I would say they can do detailed work, and I am looking forward to getting my hands on an M4.
Has anybody tried V carving on the V4? I’m spending the shopless winter with a much smaller CNC router (400x400m, 16x16"), while working through a beginner book on chip carving but doing it with CAD and the router instead of a pencil, compass, and Flexcut KN11. V carving isn’t just for text.
For those who don’t know chip carving is cutting lots of small triangles and other shapes, v-carving uses a V shaped bit and varies the cutting depth to alter the width of the cut and often results in a lot of simultaneous X, Y, and Z movement. Here’s a few examples (not from the book). I need to make some shop cabinet door fronts, why make them plain and featureless when you have a big CNC router? Feature size isn’t an issue, they’re all small and relatively shallow and leave a lot of area for the sled to ride on. It’s not going to fall into a 10mm or smaller groove
Edit: no examples, either uploaded from a file or copy/pasted they all get “an error has occurred”. Pretty easy to find some with a search engine
it should work, on the original maslow, the Z axis was very slow, which caused
problems for work doing as much Z movement as v carving does. The Maslow for
eliminates that problem, so it should work just fine.
B cutting! I forgot that f-engrave does that, I’ve been meaning to try it for years.
I’ve been doing very short cutting jobs lately, hours of design time while learning more than I want about Vectric’s node editing, vector validator, and v-carve’s closed vector mysteries, so I’ve put off trying GCodeClean. I’ll go try it on yesterday’s project
Apologies for the delayed reply, and a big thank you to everyone for your contributions and photographs. My primary interest lies in intricate detail work, such as reliefs and ornamentation. Additionally, I’m considering exploring pen or marker plotting. Based on what I’ve observed, all these endeavors seem feasibly achievable with the m4(?).
One new feature I’m considering for GCodeClean is to support proportional reduction of the Z values for doing something like carving reliefs. So you could take a scan of someone (or something) in full 3d, and then flatten that out for carving a relief.
