I have had an x35 with stiffy since it came out or a little after and upgraded to a journeyman and then a z20. I am extremely happy with it overall. My gripes are very few and generally very minor (id rather have mechanical limit switches and ability to use macros and adjust feeds and speeds on the fly). If I were starting from zero i would buy the Elite. However, I do not think the elite solving those minor quibbles is worth the upgrade cost to me personally, and the base machines are very good values. I guess I could add mechanical limit switches as is, it just isnt that important for the level of precision the work i do requires.
Hello Echd,
I have mechanical limit on my machine now, and half time does work when homing, but I think that is the design that is causing that. One person who wrote said the tolerance is is pretty tight which is something I am looking for as I am beginning to do inlays. My current machine is having issues flexing when using a tapered ball nose with hardwoods. It flexes too much even after talking with the maker still can’t get good cuts.
Thanks for your time!
That is unfortunate. I often build jigs for my more frequently requested pieces (normally just a piece of ply or mdf with the cutout of the workpiece in it) and the repeatability is easily good enough to return to the same workpiece to correct things like a botched vcarve inlay.
As stated, my gripes are minor and for the weekend warrior or hobbyist I think the onefinity is the best thing running. Perhaps one day ill buy an elite and sell my x50, but it is a machine that easily meets my needs so it isnt really worth the change.
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I’ve had my Onefinity almost 2 years now, no problems. I have the original Woodworker with the Stiffy. I would definitely buy again. As for software, I use Carveco. I can do everything i need to do at a third of the price.
i know you probably have enough reassurance that this machine is a beast and solid, but i’ll put my 2c here incase you need more affirmation.
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i have had a couple issues that needed contact with support. one was in shipping which they took care of immediately, and they have redesigned their shipping boxes to fix any of those issues, the other stuff required some back and forth just so they could be sure what they were going to do was the right fix. best customer support i have dealt with in a long time.
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i can’t really say one way or the other as i am still running the trim router, but do plan on purchasing a spindle this coming year and glad i have it.
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i love mine - couldn’t be happier - well if i wouldn’t break any bits from my own ignorance, that would make me happier.
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and more - i don’t think there is anything this wouldn’t do that i need/want it for.
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i use Fusion 360 only so can’t help you there.
you won’t regret the purchase - solid machine, good people and endless making.
enjoy.
j
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Thank you Tro….Carvco has some really nice features but I am Vested with Vectric financially and experience.
Thank you Mallet. Lol yeah I think we all broken bits and probably will forever because we tend to like to push things for various reasons! Thank you for taking the time to post.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
As one old fart to another, yes to buying it again. The only advice I would give you is to buy the biggest one you can afford. because you will always outgrow whatever you buy. I am using vetrics pro and that I have not outgrown. I infract am taking a course on this software because it has a lot more capabilities than I could discover meandering about the program on my own.
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Hey Hardtail,
Good to know. Vectric is very powerful. A CNC group I am a member (we meet once a month) we discuss Vectric ‘tricks’ as a part of the meeting.
I would love the Journeyman but I am trying to figure out how to reconfigure my current work space for the WW. lol
Thanks!
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Hey Kevin,
It’s a beast.
But I needed 120 cm workarea width.
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I think to some degree use case, cost, expectations, experience, all come into play.
I purchased the original WWX35 bare bones as I knew already over 2 years ago I wanted my own Masso G3 controller, cabling, motors, and ATC spindle. With no machining experience at all, but with some confidence understanding linear motion, I chose Onefinity as the best value with the best hardware and design - being Canadian and 45 minutes north of my home was a bonus.
I knew I would start by trying to master aluminum, with wood being more forgiving. I have put a great deal of effort into sourcing high quality components for my upgrades, from cabling to tooling, and an equal (and ongoing) effort learning F360 and effective and realistic CAM. My set up has not disappointed me, and I am able to do what I want with it, to the tolerances I expect (I still aim for sub 10 micron tolerances on certain parts in aluminum). My own experience therefore differs from yours, and does not support your general statement that “…if you want to do aluminum and wood you need a more heavy duty solution.” (see below however).
With the experience I have gained I realize that a second machine is in my future should I continue designing and producing aluminum parts, but that will not be a CNC router but a small mill that I will work to make as rigid and as accurate as possible within the budget and space I have. My Woodworker however as set up now, is doing everything I personally need it to do - maybe slower, but I am retired and it is a hobby not a business. If Onefinity were to sell my machine (not ATC), they would have to charge a great deal more, and that puts it into the price bracket of another class of machine. I believe it remains an incredible value for its intended use case and buyer.
I like a lot of what the newer Carbide 3D team are offering as far as their motion hardware and overall focus on providing complete packages as standard. I also like that they have a dedicated ‘Winston Moy’ who does the kind of deep dive into machining on their various CNCs. Although I have not logged the many years I have on their forum, like I have on this one, or Masso’s and others, I can say from experience that all the concerns I have heard here, have come up on these others as well. I can say my personal experiences with the Onefinity and Masso forums and support has been excellent to date.
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TMToronto,
Great information. I agree with a complete package from Carbide but the 30x30 is more of what I need for my applications. I do not see, at least now, doing any metal but it nice to know it is available if I want to.
Thanks for your time,
Kevin
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The machine is a beast, i have the x50 if you go 48 i would say get a stiffy or 50mm especially if you are thinking about getting a spindle.
Biggest gripes are emi and blackbox software. I used ugs and openbuilds, the biggest adjustments are losing most ugs features and the machine clears its positions every home. Blackbox homes, probes, and runs files that’s pretty much it.
The losing positions is what makes emi such a pain, a little static and the machine is lost and you have to re-home and re-probe and hope for the best.
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Hey Nick,
that is not true. The buildbotics-derived Onefinity Controller implements a full RS-274 and even more, a LinuxCNC G-code implementation. What you probably mean, is that it lacks some comfortable pages on its user interface for a number of functions.
That it looses its values on e-stop is something that I can’t understand. Why? This is the most strange thing. But I have discovered that every offset is in fact still there, in the log file. With a bit of programming, you could get your values back immediately, and also the values of the last years, because it uses logfile rotation and the logfiles are never deleted. So what I believe (and what I wrote in some postings) is I think the Buildbotics.com CNC controller and its fork, the Onefinity Controller, would need some further developing. As it is a free and open source object, it is waiting for the community to contribute too.
That’s why I would never put a Onefinity into operation and service in the state it was delivered. Specifically the lack of shielding of all cables and the lack of a serious cabling solution (both on Original X-35/X-70 and Elite Series), in combination with the lack of strain relief on moving cables and the connectors that are only made for internal use and are wrongly used on the outside of an electronics device (inherited from upstream Buildbotics.com) is what I would consider as a danger for my workpieces and my bits and my nerves.
I never used ugs. Are there any specific features that you had there that you would mention here, that the buildbotics-derived Onefinity Controller lacks?
It does not clear any of the offsets when you home the machine. EDIT: This is wrong, it looses the offsets /EDIT. What it looses, is the accurate position of the home itself because of unreliable Stall Homing, that is true. Therefore I recommend to either never click on any of the “home” buttons except once after startup of the machine, but instead enter G53 G0 X0 Y0 Z0 into the command entry field of the MDI interface, which will simply drive to the machine origin, but without the bumping to re-establish home that stall homing does, or to Retrofit Hardware Limit Sensors, which can easily be attached to the buildbotics-derived Onefinity controller, as shown in many posts in this forum (search for ‘inductive proximity’), as the buildbotics controller is able to use them if you connect them to the 25-pin I/O port, to get rid of unreliable stall homing. Then you have excellent homing repeatablity.
For the case that you are forced to re-home, because the machine suddenly stopped and lost its values or after a power outage, there is a method with the Touch probe and a clamped block permanently on machine bed, somewhere away from the workpiece, instead of homing that ensures accurate position repeatability. I hope if you have such frequent errors due to EMI, that you use this method in order not to loose your workpiece every time.
that indeed sounds like it is a pain. Have you already tried some of the possible countermeasures against EMI?
In terms of support, I am someone who has had to use them many times due to a few teething issues with my Elite Journeyman. Here are a few; - No resistors on motors, no resistors causing motors to get damaged, bad motor on X rail, problems with the coupler on the Y\B stepper motor\ball screw.
All of these issues did not appear at once, so it was a near three month cycle of being up for a few weeks, and down for a few days or sometimes a week. Yes, it was frustrating, especially when you have customers waiting.
Before buying the machine, I used to read comments saying how fantastic the support was, and how parts were shipped overnight or really quickly. “Yes”, I thought to myself, “but most of these customers are in the US\North America region. I live in the UK. What happens then when something goes wrong? It’s going to take forever to get parts and I’m going to have issues with the time zone waiting for replies from support.”
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first issue I had that I emailed them about was replied to in less than 15 minutes. Each corresponding response was equally as quick if not faster. The first time I ever contacted support was 3:30pm on a Wednesday afternoon UK time. It took an hour to diagnose the issue via photos, and I had a set of resistors and two spare motors “just in case” - “because of the distance I lived.” (Which in the end was important as they were needed) delivered to my house by 1:30pm UK time on the Friday. Less than 48 hours from first contact.
They have since embellished this with every part that has needed to be replaced, with exactly the same efficiency. They even organised a face to face zoom call so we could go through the issues one by one. In short I can not speak highly enough of their support.
If anything ever goes wrong in the future I know they have me covered. They also actively encourage you to be intuitive, and not expect them to work everything out themselves.
I have no affiliation with Onefinity. This is my first machine and experience with them, and the support truly is one of a kind. They were patient, and thanked me for my patience, as there were times it was getting frustrating. This is a long way of saying, don’t worry about their support. It’s brilliant.
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The bulk of the features are improvements to make working with the machine easier. UGS allows users to arrange the UI panels in ways that make sense to them, it allows an unlimited number of macros and can assign them to buttons on the UI, it makes it easy to switch between position offsets, it doesn’t lose offsets between power cycles and it supports plugins for additional functionality. It also allows you to map commands to shortcut keys so you can use a USB 10key as a pendant. … Basically it’s got a good UI that makes working with a CNC faster. Openbuilds was similar but a bit nicer than UGS to work with. Another nice openbuilds function was the ability to outline your job so you could confirm clamps were out of the way and everything was going to fit on your workpiece.
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This may be a case of me not understanding what is happening if I power on my machine, home it, and then probe a location the machine shows offsets and a zero position, if I hit home again the machine will home and then all of my positions will reset back to zero and all of my offsets are gone. Is there a different way I should be assigning my work coordinates?
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Why is this a retrofit and not a factory-sold upgrade, stall homing is easily the #1 Onefinity gripe. I’m unlikely to drop 2k on an elite upgrade but they could hit me for $200 all day long for a sensor kit.
Hey Nick,
you are right, that is strange too. I have a controller here in my electronics lab and it is connected over network to any computer where I could be here (without the CNC machine attached to the controller) so I just tested it (see screenshots below). What it should do (what one would expect) is that it just drives the carriages to their home positions, performs stall homing (as set in the corresponding MOTORS page) and adjusts the values in the ‘position’ column of CONTROL page, but not the ‘offsets’. So I was wrong with what I wrote above. I find that strange.
Note that I am not using the Onefinity controller and don’t plan to use it on my Onefinity as I intend to use another controller. I am just fascinated about the buildbotics.com project and am sometimes exploring the Onefinity controller that is a software and hardware fork of the Buildbotics controller.
But I wrote frequently in the forum that stall homing is unreliable, because it never ends the homing process at exactly the same positions as before. It is more of a makeshift solution for homing because the manufacturer wanted to keep the price low and saved on everything, which means here on hardware limit sensors.
So what I frequently wrote, is that one should always avoid homing procedure (except once at startup – but only if you don’t have a machine position that you want to retain after a power loss),
and instead use G53 G0 X0 Y0 Z0
in the MDI tab or in a g-code program, to drive to the home position. This really does only the movement to the registered home coordinates, without the bumping of stall homing. ‘G53’ means “move in machine coordinates”, without altering any stored values (except absolute position of course). (Note: G53 is, unlike G54-59, G52 and G92, no modal command, which means it has to be given everytime before a motion command like G0 or G1). ‘G0’ means “move rapidly, ignoring feedrate”.
This is also the command I use for driving to the home position for a manual tool change ➪ in my own ‘tool-change’ routine.
Screenshots
Image 1: To avoid: The Homing Buttons (on top: home all axes, below are buttons for homing each axis individually)
Image 2: Moving the axes to X=100 mm, Y=100 mm, and Z=-50 mm, and then zeroing this position as offset (workpiece zero) (using G92)
Image 3: After homing all axes, not only the ‘Absolute’ positions are homed, but also the ‘offsets’ previously made active with
G0 X100 Y100 Z-50 and then G92 X0 Y0 Z0 are gone.