Shaper Origin

[kresty]

For my birthday I got a toy... I don't have anything posted, but we used it on a couple bits of the toolbox droid last week.  

Using it very quickly for a couple short jobs I was able to get "decent" results.  I'm not sure how I'd get the fancy stuff they mentioned though, seems like it'd need more work.

Aligning bits was tough.  I wanted it "precisely" on Lego, but it was really hard to get it into the exact points on the piece that I wanted using their visual alignment tool.  Maybe this is a beginner's thing and there are better techniques I can learn.  

The best I got for alignment was to make a jig for small parts, use a couple to get it positioned where I wanted (maybe there's a way to bump the position of an existing design, but I kept having to re-place the curve).  Once I got it lined up it was pretty repeatable.

Once aligned, it followed the curve pretty well.  There are a couple of bits where it sort of jumped away from where I'd wanted it - primarily because the first time I did a 90 degree turn apparently there's some angular momentum that pulled it differently than I'd expected.  Elsewhere it seemed like my Lego wasn't smooth enough and it'd be "grabby" as I moved the router along it.

I'll have to play with it more.  It did accomplish the goal of not having to go to work's laser cutter and at the same time not having a huge fixed CnC that I had to figure out where to store.  The precision is probably good enough for most of what we need it for - though I'm not sure how one would manage to get the fine inlay that they seem to imply is feasible.

Of course we only used it a few times:  Wooden platforms on toolbox body bottom, lego plates for hubs, and curved parts for "eyes" on the front of toolbox.  Most tools you have to use more than 3 times to get anything reasonable with it.  It's certainly much better than I could do with a normal router.