Nomad 3 info, plus something else

Announcements
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Here’s what Bantam claims for their really loud milling machine’s motor
" SPINDLE MOTOR POWER: 250W , 1/4 HP at the motor output shaft"
So, the maximum motor output is 0.25 X 745.7 = 186.4 W. The spindle drive (gears or belt?) and bearings will further reduce the spindle output power. Unfortunately, those hobbyist “in-runner” and “out-runner” motors are rated on input rather than output power like other types. So, depending on their relative efficiencies, the actual spindle powers available may not be that different on the two machines. The Bantam’s efficiency sounds pretty low to me.

I wonder what belts/pulleys the Nomad (and Bantam?) use to achieve those high speeds. Does the Nomad have an ER11 collet too?

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I think a big thing to mention here is the constant improvement. From the day I bought my first shapeoko all the way through till this very moment, Carbide 3D’s goals is to make our machines, interactions and experience the very best they can be. I cannot count on how many changes the Shapeoko line has had over the past few years, and to be honest I don’t know how the team manage to constantly build in running changes into production and then support them. I’ve been here for over a year now and I’m still in awe of the people and the passion they have for making things great.

There will always be a new thing, feature, tool etc. We won’t stop developing and improving things, and most of the time we will try to do it in a way to be inclusive for all. In some cases we can’t do that and new models are born.

Whilst some projects take months or years, others will happen so fast it would make Elon blush. As Rob has mentioned our in-house manufacturing capability is growing stronger month on month and we hope to keep pushing the limits.

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I can see that being a thing in some spaces but I don’t think everyone thinks like you do.

“Thems the breaks” is one way of looking at it but another way of looking at it is that the business is withholding information from its customers with the explicit intent of having them overpay for an inferior product. I’m not saying that’s Carbide 3D’s intention, just that that’s the behaviour the Osborne effect seems to encourage.

If I knew or felt that a company operated on such a principle, and I had any choice, I’d never buy from them again and I don’t think I’m the only one.

And besides that, if there’s a competitor, the concern shouldn’t be whether people are buying the old product or the new product, the concern is whether they’re buying your product. If you keep things to yourself too long, people are more likely to go to a competitor who announces things earlier.

Again, not saying this applies to Carbide 3D, just criticising the Osborne effect and the behaviour it encourages in general.

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Yep,

As Alexander says, if you constantly announce “don’t buy our current product, there’s a way better one coming next month” your ability to exist and serve any customers at all is rapidly compromised.

Carbide has been pretty clear all the time I’ve been watching that they are in a state of continuous development and it seems they’re trying to put the continuous delivery ethos from software into hardware which is, shall we say, ambitious. I like it, and I hope they make it work, so much so that I occasionally make “suggestions” in threads that read like it’s my dev team not theirs :zipper_mouth_face:

I also like their level of tolerance for warranty voiding, equipment breaking users who come back and ask why their custom mod machine no longer works right with their standard software etc. That is unusual, in hardware or software businesses.

The Nomad 3 was pre-announced with quite a bit of notice and I thought at the time “Yikes, I hope they don’t have too much stock left in the supply chain”.

It’s never going to be possible to make machines that meet everyone’s sets of differing and conflicting demands of;

  • hobby price point
  • large footprint
  • commercial precision
  • greater than hobby speeds

etc.

I’m as guilty as anyone else of rattling those fences, see my little pile of HiWin rails waiting for an adapter plate to come from Xometry.

Am I upset that the Shapeoko Pro has arrived as I’m halfway through the linear rail conversion? No, not really, buying a whole new machine would still be a lot more money than my planned upgrade.

Am I glad that there’s a more rigid option for people that want the precision or cutting speeds? Yep, sure, now people who don’t want to do the upgrade or pay 4x as much for the Avid can just get an off the shelf machine with a warranty that does an impressive job of spanning those mutually incompatible demands. The addition of “pro” and “HD” parts and configs is a great way to start covering some of those varied demands.

Unlike certain other companies, I very much get the impression that Carbide is trying to live up to their promises to their customers and do :poop: better, not just extract a few more $ for this quarter’s financial report. It’s a difficult line to straddle, running a business ethically, the way you think it ought to be and making the finance work at the same time and I think Carbide is doing a pretty good job of that.

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68

If I knew or felt that a company operated on such a principle, and I had any choice, I’d never buy from them again and I don’t think I’m the only one.

It’s not a management philosophy that company chooses to adopt, it’s a reality of the market that companies have to be aware of, especially in new and growing market like CNC. Reality is we’re all still early adopters.

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69

The spindle power increase was probably to support the spindle speed increase (more MRR without more force). Like a HF Spindle, the available cutting power will likely be proportional to speed. The 24,000 RPM is a godsend for everything except possibly some ferrous metals and Titanium. Maybe change the pulley ratio for them? :wink:

Other than being limited to 10,000 RPM, do you think that the 70W spindle was a limiting factor on the current stock Nomad’s performance?

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You can ask Luke how much I try to pry info out of him to no avail. I am 99% certain he considers me a pain in the arse. :smiley:

Here’s my take on product releases. This comes from a decade of experience in the automotive performance aftermarket, doing R&D, bringing products to market, and dealing with severe manufacturing delays. I’m as enthusiastic as the rest of us here, but I’ve also been an enthusiast that works in the field they’re enthusiastic about.

If you announce before a lot of things line up, you can get HAMMERED by one tiny thing getting delayed or a subcontractor not delivering. We literally had an exhaust on constant backorder for a couple of years. IT WAS EXHAUSTING! (Pun 100% intended.) For an ECU upgrade at first we had people send in their ECUs to us, we reprogrammed, and sent back. A programmer we could send out was always in works, but there was no way to announce it and set proper expectations. Also, as pointed out, that would have dried up the revenue that was paying for the hardware development, injection molding, electronics, softeare development, etc… so the programmer literally wouldn’t have happened otherwise because the money would have gone away. Just like in the Osborne example. It holds true and is not an ethical thing… it is driven by the consumer, not the producer.

We shot ourselves in the foot repeatedly until we learned to keep product development more under wraps until we were damn near ready to ship.

I get it. I really do. But it’s a fine line to walk, and the approach C3D took is better than announcing a new machine, then making people wait months to get it in my opinion.

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also ,… most of the time you don’t know if a product is going to really pan out until late…
either due to challenges, or because you don’t know if a market will be there

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Pretty clear cut answer from Sales that there is only the XXL size available and no custom sizes or plans to create bigger machines.

Literally the only thing I want different from my current XXL is a 48x48 or bigger work area so I can work efficiently with sheet material and cut longer parts.

The machines look great, I love the way you guys run the business, but you’re missing out on a market by not providing that [very slightly] larger work envelope.

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I’m not sure right now.

The thing is that I’ve been trying to take cuts that are theoretically within the specified capabilities of the spindle and the cuts are unsuccessful, there’s a ton of ugly noise that I assume is chatter.

The limiting factor could be power, cutting speed, rigidity, or just lack of coolant, I just don’t know.

My wish is to have a machine that allows me to use the feeds and speeds recommendations from tool manufacturers though and the 24k bump certainly helps.

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I suspect most tool manufacturers provide recommendations tuned for the big & bulky & expensive pro machines, so I don’t know if this is a realistic expectation? Not trying to rain on your parade, but I feel that physics (weight/rigidity) will get in the way of a quest for a sub-4K machine that would hog metal without blinking. And then again with @Vince.Fab and the like pushing the limits all the time, who knows…

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I’m sure @wmoy can tell us the differences as he’s spent lots of time with both machines.

The new and improved AB nuts should make a world of a difference. And I wouldn’t get so hung up about the recommendations from tool manufacturers. They for sure didn’t use a Nomad to come up with them.

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I’m not so sure it’s out of the question. There’s another desktop CNC floating around that showed that you can fit a 2.2kW spindle, ballscrews, linear rails and flood coolant into a frame rigid enough for steel, for $2800 USD.

It’s not the recommendations so much as the Nomad being unpredictable. Like, if I take the chip load number from the manufacturer, it’s usually pretty reasonable, say 0.015mm for Aluminium usually. When I take that chipload and use a feeds and speeds calculator programmed with the Nomad’s capabilities, it spits out a cut that should work but doesn’t.

I think the biggest issue with oldNomad is the spindle speed though and Nomad 3 has resolved that, so I have high hopes, even though it isn’t so crazy powerful as the stuff you’ve done.

Actually Vince, do you have any way of seeing how much power your spindles/routers use when making heavier cuts? I’d be really curious to see that data.

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Some are also making tools that are compatible with the high speed low power spindles available for those mills. “There’s no limit to how fast aluminum can be machined.” Higher speeds reduce forces which likely helps explain @Vince.Fab’s apparent “need for speed.”

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Sounds right to me! Who knows the tool capabilities better than their manufacturers?

How about your cuts?

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I’m hoping the Shapeoko Pro will have dual Y axis homing switches/endstops, to allow for ‘auto squaring’. If this hasn’t been considered for the final production, will you please add it?

On another note, how is the Onefinity cnc able to offer ballscrews on all axes at a pricepoint lower (Canadian company no less, so their parts costs would most likely be higher)? I do wish belts were completely removed.

Would be nice if the HDZ with ballscrew was included instead of the Z plus with leadscrew.

I really like @DanStory HG15 rails more and I don’t think they would look out of place at all on the Shapeoko Pro. MGN rails are typically great for 3D printers.

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Onefinity has lower costs in other areas of the machine that mean they can spend some more on ball screws.

No bed…at all.
Off the shelf round rails.
A BOM for the machine that looks like it uses 50 less parts.
An off the shelf controller.
Fewer electronics like homing switches.

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Taking some design cues from the Onefinity would’ve been nice.

However, I’ve yet to see a non paid/freebie review for their CNC online.

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I’m also very interested to see how the machine rigidity works out in the real, unpaid-for review world.

Those round rails only constrain in two dimensions and are separate elements which allow the cutting forces to leverage between them instead of being a single X or Y beam. Whereas, on the Shapeoko Pro the linear rails are on a single large axis beam extrusion with high rigidity and each rail allows only one degree of freedom. That’s a huge difference.

On the subject of ballscrews, not all ballscrews are created equal either, cheap ballscrews with cheap end mount bearings have both substantial backlash and can be quite inconsistent in movement distance over their length.

Belts have some significant advantages on a budget machine, way less motor power is needed as you’re not spinning up the screws, meaning cheaper electronics and cheaper motors. The design backlash in the GT2 belt profile is zero so far as a CNC router is concerned. Belts are much more forgiving than ballscrews too.

I’ve been looking closely at the Shapeoko deflections and how much can be attributed to the belts and it’s not much in terms of absolute accuracy.

To me the OneFinity ticks many of the boxes of the “Beginners’ guide to how not to design a CNC machine”, as said above, their BoM must be heavily skewed to the cost of the ballscrews, motors and electronics which means they’ve saved a lot of money elsewhere, in linear rails, no base frame at all etc.

The jury is very much out…

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New machine looks great. If it was available back when I made my purchase, I certainly would have paid the difference. Belts, including the Z axis, have proven fine for me. The V wheels on the z and x, flexy x/z plates, and terrible bed, have proven inconsistent for my purpose. All told, its a machine I don’t care about crashing, and that is very nice. While hardly efficient, its proven useable and very informative.

I’d hazard a baseless guess that the sub 4’x(x) size is a factor of manufacturing capability, and most likely, common carrier shipping constraints. I enjoy having the little xxl to play with, and as much as I’d like to have the Pro instead, I don’t think its my next machine, even at 1/10th the entry level cost of what I am now actively shopping.

As for Hobby related stuff, The OneFinity does not look appealing to me at all.

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