I’ve just pulled the trigger on the ShapeOko Pro XXL,
I was attracted to the construction of the Pro XXL, but will be holding out judgement on the elctronicals. as I’ve been using Mach 3, and Geckodrives for years.
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Welcome, from a Spartan old timer. Good call on going with Carbide, lots of advice here on the forum. (I’m in CA now but just got a shipment of glass from Delphi in Lansing!)
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I see from your profile that you’re in Lansing, MI; I wasn’t sure from the title if that was IL, NY, KS, or MI haha. Welcome to the community!
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Welcome to the neighborhood!
Let us know in case there’s any burning question on your mind while you wait for the machine to arrive
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Welcome!
I used to bounce around Lansing and Grand Rapids visiting retailers out there. Great people.
The SOPro is a beast.
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The assembly went well, and the first cuts were made yesterday. Since it is set up in my basement, I took the extra step of applying a couple o coats of clear lacquer to the mdf, sanded them, and then applied a coat of carnuba wax on all sides before installing them. Between Samcraft, and Winston’s Youtube videos, it went together really well.
I also installed the Bitzero, and it needs more work done. I would like to see an option of where you set it on your work piece to set that corner zero, Doing a little CAM programing at work, the machine shop always looked for 0,0 to be at the back left corner of the workpiece, as that’s where the “hard jaw” of the vise is.
It also sucks when you forget to attach the ground to the spindle, and have to go through the whole initialize routine. I can see the necessity if you crash the spindle, and the machine loses it’s location, but since you are right there setting zero, you know if you need to rehome the machine or not.
Bitsetter, There was a couple of times that bit ended up 0.10" below where it was supposed to be.
It would be nice if the display for the machine coordinates were larger.
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So, in the past month of owning this, I’m happy. Were there issues? Yep, but I dealt with them. I killed the bearing in the nose of the carbide router, My fault, I was pushing it 
. Was able to run down to the local box store and pick up a Makita and finish the job.
I got to where I couldn’t trust the bitsetter, until this past weekend I eliminated the connectors for the Z proximity switch, and motor. While I was at it, I eliminated the connector for the X motor. Was it really necessary? Maybe not, but I did have to fritz with the Z proximity switch connector, which eliminated most of the inconsistencies in Z height, but I suspected the Z motor connector of being a little finicky, so I just soldered, and heatshrinked them. Tonight’s project went without a hitch.
I am looking forward to the VFD spindle that will be appearing someday from Carbide 3D,
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Please let us know about the bad bearing at support@carbide3d.com and the other issues — we need to know about this sort of thing for QC purposes if nothing else.
I had a 4 flute, 1/4" endmill doing a contour cut, at to deep, and the bit did not have deep enoughrecesses to clear the chips, cutting MDF. I couldn’t fault the router for the failure.
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