Post by jimustanguitar on May 11, 2017 7:17:33 GMT -5
When I was in Durham for Duke, I had an opportunity to go see ShopBot's facility. They sell CNC routers of all shapes and sizes, and have a neat little operation. It reminded me of SeeMeCNC a little bit by being a small local company that does business with other local businesses and has a little bit of a cult following from their users.
One of the really cool things that they showed off is their new vacuum hold down system. Their big routers have an ($11,000!) pump on them that sucks hard enough to draw air through solid MDF panels and hold down wood without having to make a gasketed jig custom for that job. Everything just sticks to the MDF.
They also offer some wood routers with ATC tool changers.
Another offering is the handibot router, which is a smaller and more portable model that you set on the work, and move around in tiles to work on a whole piece of wood. They've even written GCode to make the tool plunge route a hole, turn off the spindle, and move the axes to walk the router around on top of the work automatically.