What features would you like to see in 2024?

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey M,

@MKrupp

I have a bit of a stash of ambroyna burl with each piece worth several hundred dollars, if you can even find it. There has to be no risk of errors before I put that in the machine!

Then I hope you are aware that many people lost expensive wood blanks by not observing a few design flaws or incomplete furnishings of the Onefinity machines:

@Aiph5u

@Machinist

Given the otherwise heavy-duty and commercial-grade build of the machine, I was surprised that the cabling was not equally conforming. My thought was that it would be an easy fix, but I never did fix it (properly) before I sold the machine.

the question is what they could have used instead.

Onefinity obviously took over the connectors choice from the buildbotics.com project (so it’s them who made that choice), by first using their pcb layout and then modifiying it only slightly, leaving those Molex/Amphenol sockets there.

I’ve shared my thoughts on a possible choice for better stepper connectors here, and if I go with reputable industry connectors, it gets very expensive very quickly. That surely was out of the question for the Onefinity designers, which obviously had to realize a low price of entry (not to say some sort of combat price)). It would have not been of any advantage to them if you can throw the direct competitor products in the trash, but deterred potential buyers with too high a price. So they designed a machine that realizes an unusual, robust and handsome concept in the mechanical components (which led to their success), but lacks a lot of components, or the sufficient quality of those: A CNC without a machine base (you have to build the table – & the QCW frame introduced later is extremely expensive for what it offers), no serious cable routing, no milling motor, no homing sensors but using stall homing instead (which the buildbotics’s internal stepper drivers already provide for free), etc.

They realized the low price they needed, and had a great success, with many owners of other hobbyist CNC machines selling their old machine to buy a Onefinity, but the hassle of failing cables and connectors, which often comes after a year of use (=of motion without connector strain relief, or with a Z stepper cable that is not made for permanent motion), or the susceptability to positioning errors or step loss caused by electromagnetic interference (EMI) because of using unshielded cables, are a heavy legacy. I wouldn’t put the machine to work like this, at least not when I’ve spent relevant amounts of money on my wood blanks (which is easily the case in professional context – think of violinmaking and luthery).

@MKrupp

I’m wanting the 48" to allow for a neck through design on an electric bass as the longest thing I’m wanting to do. My woodworker does fine on a normal electric neck but anything longer and it has to be done diagonally, which I just don’t want to go there if I can avoid it.

I could do it on a Journeyman with the long axis in the X direction but I design in CAD with the guitar oriented with the neck vertical in the Y direction.

Then we want the same, for the same purpose. But I bought my Journeyman already, that unfortunately has Y in the short dimension and X on the long. A solution for this I had in mind (except asking Onefinity to sell me two Foreman Y rails separately), since I want to weld a machine base from steel profiles anyway, is to weld a frame that encloses the entire machine and to mount the machine upside down to it, with the spindle still pointing downwards. This way I would have no machine feet in the way, in no direction

@MKrupp

Cool you’re thinking of doing a neck on a rotary. I had wondered about that and wasn’t sure if an unsupported (in the middle) neck would be stiff enough to mill like that. When I asked a while back what people where planning on using a rotary for I was hoping to get some insight into whether a guitar neck could be done. It sure would be interesting if it could!

It is not really necessary, if you see the videos from Fender and Gibson factory. But if you build historical instruments with more complicated design, or with sophisticated neck joints, or instruments where the headstock is the head of an animal or another type of “sculpture”, you begin to think of a rotary axis. Therefore my machine base would not be a tabletop, but a U-shaped base with enough room for a rotary axis, and with wasteboards that can be attached at different heights above the rotary.

But you can very well mill a Jazz Bass neck on a gantry machine with flat table and that is too short and too narrow for such a neck, as is demonstrated here