very nice tool, did you use prepreg composites?

Yeh, a good point.

Ive been speaking to a friend of mine today who built his own CNC router with Chinese framework and American/German electronics. He uses it for cutting 10mm aluminium, mostly 2D/2.5D stuff but says he is sure it would do what I'm wanting it to do with ease. Extremely little backlash, doesnt get any chatter or lost steps so long as he keeps to 0.2mm passes and doesnt get impatient with the feeds, and he says it is accurate to 0.1mm as long as everything stays in tune.

So I may go have a play with it sometime, see if we can test it's limitations. He is also currently planning on building a new one, so I may share that build with him and see if we can build something that suits the both of us.

Maybe one last thought here. You mentioned milling female moulds for intake tubes. This is a perfect example where precision is critical. Tube require a split mould. So the edges should align perfectly, and the flange surfaces should be straight. At least so good, that you don't need 80grit paper to sand it flush.

Yeh I considered it for that purpose, but I think if I'm going to spend $1500 on a machine (as well as dedicate a relatively large footprint of my quite small workshop) then it needs to do more of the job than what realistically only takes me 20 minutes to do by hand.

Really I wanted to skip the pattern making process altogether and go straight to machining small female tools for low volume production runs. Things like intake pipes for various vehicles, where they are so small and simple to do, but there's enough little variations between models that you would need dozens and dozens of moulds. If I could do that sort of thing quite quickly then it becomes more realistic to offer it for under 20 pieces, but otherwise I can't warrant making a mould unless I'm going to use it for dozens of pulls.

@cumberdale: a x-carve is a whole diffent story compared to a stepcraft. The working area is much bigger, while the profiles are much thinner, resulting in a much, much lower stiffness.

@ hanaldo: the feeds etc. Are dependant to the system you are using. For tooling board you are usually using a high spindle rpm, and then make the first passes as fast as your machine can handle. The finishing pass however is made much slower, with a ball end router bit. The smaller machines usually only take small bits, resulting in a smaller radius of the ball end, so you need a far more passes, to get a good surface.
Remember, that an x-carve is suitable (not ideal in my opinion) for cutting out 2d shapes. So plug slice cutting could be an option. This could make things a lot easier and could be a nice cnc intro. You should certainly not start with 3d anyways.

Very nice oekmont, certainly far more than I would ever need for the size of my business as it is! Very envious though, I'd love to play around with some serious equipment.

Cumberdale, thanks for that mate, I appreciate that advice. I did wonder what you were using for working with your tooling board and had hoped you would chime in, so I'll keep that in mind. I think the initial excitement has died down a bit now, so I'll be happy enough just playing around with the CAM simulations in F360 and seeing if I can get all of that right. Fortunately one of my customers actually owns a commercial CNC workshop, and he has all sorts of serious 3/4/5 axis CNC machines. He has offered to mill stuff for me if I do the drawings and things, so that may be a good way to start having a play and understanding how things work, I just always felt a little embarrassed to use a 5m x 5m machine to mill down a 150mm piece of tooling block! 😅

Hey Hanaldo,

I happen to own a Stepcraft 480 Black. It depends on what you want to do with your machine, but for my purposes it is good enough as an entry machine. I have a lot to do with 3D-printers (FDM, SLA, SLS), and nothing 3d-printed (even 50k$+ machines) rivals my Stepcraft considering part accuracy and reproducibility. And I am pretty sure if you only need your machine once in a while for some epoxy tooling board milling and you don't need sub 0.1mm accuracy, an X-carve will do just fine. Even if you plan on eventually investing $5k+ on a cnc machine, I would always recommend to play around with an X-carve or Stepcraft first for a couple of months to get the hang of everything. You first need to understand feeds & speeds, CAM, different bits for different purposes, the right spindle (i.e. brushless) and how everything comes together. It really depends on the size of your projects. For example, I would need maybe 8-10 hours of milling to produce the mould in the above video, simply because it is too big and I can't be more aggressive with my feeds and speeds, my spindle, and am also missing stiffness in the portal.
CNC Forums can be a nightmare if you are new to CNC, lots of contradictory information. That's the main reason why I would recommend a cheaper entry to see for yourself if it is for you and later — if necessary — upgrade to something with a little more bite to it.

@oekmont looks impressive. Where are you located? 

It just happend, that while we were texting here, I bought an upgrade for my cnc solution. 1000 pounds of stiffness here. This machine can do some serious aluminium milling. I will have to swap the computer however, because a laptop,as I wrote earlier, can cause many problems. I liked milling composite plates in a water bath, and this isn't an option with my new cnc, as one of the axis is realised by moving the table. But so much performance will outweigh the struggle with the air filtration.