This is a great topic and some great info in here.
I will add a few things here as well that I haven’t seen mentioned:
- Workholding - Omer Composite Nail Gun - quickly fix your material to spoilboard. No fear since composite nails (plastic) won’t damage a cutting bit.
- Bit Change - Torque Wrench - setting proper torque on nut (example: ER20 Collet is ~50ft/lbs)
Torque Specifications - Techniks CNC Tooling Solutions - CAD/CAM - I recommend signing up for trial of Easel and get confidence quickly in your simple designs right away. Then move onto Fusion360, Shapr3D, Carveco, or Vectric/Aspire for more advanced 2D and 3D designs. I don’t like perpetual licenses and Vectric. Vectric to me is legacy software and is painful to look at. While powerful in it’s own right, I would prefer to grow with a modern software like Shapr3D then export the gcode to Fusion360 and then use Fusion360 post-processor to bring that into Easel. This is the “best in breed” approach to me. Having multiple tools to leverage their strengths -if your budget allows. I think software is all about personal comfort level and budget. I own a perpetual license for Cinema4D, and now they have to gone to monthly subscription to get future updates. I wish I didn’t buy the perpetual license (almost $4k) but that is all they had at the time - and now they are moving everyone to monthly subscription. Keep in mind, that monthly subscriptions allows developers consistently cashflow for continual updates. They also can attract more investment capital since MRR (monthly run rates) for software companies offer stability from a cash-flow perspective (similar to a utility company). One-time purchases are sporadically and too volatile for continual investment from an investor point of view. It is smart for software companies to have a stable business model (to grow and develop their software and support it). If they can attract investment capital it means they can hire and pay their developers for continual development. Perpetual licenses appears more attractive to the buyer, but down the road that lack of investment leads to stall-out in development and things becoming archaic and no real development - Vectric and Rhino are examples of this in my view. Sorry, I know this isn’t a popular opinion, as their is a lot of Vectric users in this space that love it and appreciate the power and the one-time license. And that is totally fine - I just happen to view it differently.
- I have the “secure from above” QC base - ugh. And so I have the MDF spoilboard pieces on it, but plan to just use that as my first layer to create flatness and then just put another layer of MDF on top of the MDF pieces in the QC base. So two layers of MDF. Since I will have the composite nail gun I don’t mind losing the ability for the t-tracks between the MDF piecees in the QC base. Again, I am just using it for table flatness. I also put some sanding sealer on the QC base MDF to mitigate against moisture changes (warping the MDF).
- 4-way clamps for glue-up panels (if you are doing things with hardwood)
- Tramming - To simplify things, I plan to use metal dowel pins (to go into collet), mini metal t-square, and smooth granite cutting board (for flatness reference, since your spoilboard may not be perfectly flat).
- Kreg 64"x64" universal work bench/table. I have cabinet grade 3/4" plywood that is lap-jointed to span the entire top, and then have the QCW base to handle the flatness on top of that. I have a pseudo-torsion box solution underneath the 3/4" plywood top. It’s not the best solution, and I might upgrade to get better rigidity at some point down the road, but it seems to be ok for now. And for my cutting tolerances (wood) I think it will be fine.