re: Next Wave CNC Shark and Other Models

Thanks Kenny, that is exactly why I posted it.  

The more I think about it, if you are a tinkerer, researcher and trouble shooter by nature.  Buying a 2nd hand CNC could be a really good place to start.  You can probably find some good bones pretty cheap, especially from someone who bought one and never really used it and is ready to clear some space in their shop.  With good bones, you can avoid the start up and design steps to building one from scratch and concentrate your cash and time on the electronics, software and other upgrades.  For the price of a new turnkey solution, you may be able to create a machine with a more flexible and extendible base should you decide you want to.  BTW, if you do look into buying a 2nd hand NW machine for example, make sure you ask about the software stack such as Vcarve.  If they are just replacing the machine with something new, they may be keeping their license but I think that they can transfer the Vcarve license one time as long as they do not try to retain it.  Vectric website should have the rules on license transfers.  

There are some good CNC forums out there but I have not looked to see if any of them have areas devoted to the sort of upgrade path I am going down.  I think I will look to see if there are any forums or FB groups that focus on bypassing  the Next Wave confinements through upgrades.  If not, I may see what it would take to start one.  Not really sure how to get the word out but I posted some of my frustration with NW on the excellent Vectric forum I titled "So Long Next Wave" and got a couple of responses about posting about how my new upgrade direction goes.   Perhaps I will just see about starting a couple of threads over there as a starting point.  NW is a customer for Vectric as every machine they sell comes with a Vcarve license so I am sure that they would not want to host a whole sub-forum on how to bypass them but I doubt that they would discourage some honest sharing about here's how I did it or questions related to it.  

We will see, but I plan to do some blogs about my current CNC activities.  My current upgrade rabbit hole started when a buddy asked me if I would interested in trying to make him an Alphorn.  I like a good (comical) challenge so I said I will look into it.   Not wanting to hand carve a 10' long trumpet the traditional way out of a tree that was growing out of the side of a mountain, I developed a segmented design I can cut in sections on my CNC that will make it possible to transport without a truck and I have used the CNC to do sort of a proof of concept.  It is all experimental and my not work at all but the CAD design working so far but it definitely is pushing the limits of my machine.  The loud, long running jobs with long bits will eventually burn out my fixed (warp) speed PC router, so I decided it was time to finally look into a variable speed, water cooled spindle upgrade.  My wife will be happy if I can just keep the noise down while the TV is on too as my shop is just on the other side of the wall from the TV.  She doesn't usually complain about my shop expenditures but she did express relief when I made some changes that lowered the CNC noise on one of my long running jobs.  I have the spindle installed and was able to run it at full speed for a few minutes just to make sure that electrical connections and the VFD are working and it is unbelievably quiet, while it is not cutting anyway.  You can actually hear the small cooling fan on the VFD running when the spindle is running at 24k RPM.  

Hopefully, I will have more fun with CNC postings to come.