in short
NO!!!
The maslow is nowhere close to acceptable industrial speeds. It isn’t designed
to be a fast machine, it’s designed to be a cheap machine for home use. It costs
around $500 with the router, while heavy duty industrial machines can run
$200,000, and even the very low-end shopbot machines can run close to $20,000.
Accuracy is improving as we improve the software (and move towards triangular
kinematics), but the initial goal of being within 1/64" is a very tight limit,
and we are not there yet, and it’s still an ambitious goal to get to that point.
a shopbot can cut up to 700 in/min with accuracy claiming 0.002 in, the maslow
can cut up to 35 in/min with an current accuracy of 0.04 (aiming for 0.015), so
the shopbot is ~20x faster and ~20x as accuracte (with us aiming to get this to
~10x as ccurate), for about 40x the price (the shopbot is actually faster than
this indicates as it can take a deeper cut at that higher speed)
And I’ll say again that the shopbot is not really considered an industrial
machine. The really serious industrial machines will spend $30k-50k on the
vaccum pump to hold the wood being cut down to the machine, and the machine can
cut out the work as fast as a person can load the wood and remove the cut
pieces.
The maslow is not trying to compete with such machines, it’s looking to bring
the capability to work with large sheets of plywood to the home shop.
Yes, the Maslow can produce professional work, but you can produce professional
work eith a handheld router, no CnC involved, so in part it depends on how you
define ‘professional’ work. Some of the pieces that people have posted pictures
of would qualify as ‘professional’ in anyone’s book, but it depends on the
requirements of the task you are working on.
As far as cutting things other than wood, the maslow will cut anything that you
could normally cut with a heavy duty handheld router. Things that are easy to
melt are going to give you more grief, just like they would if you were using a
handheld router on them.
David Lang