Yes, this is the Carbide VFD. You can certainly buy alternatives cheaper from ebay, but then you have to do all the configuration and, if it doesn’t work with the S5Pro who are you going to call?
They are 110v only, but I bought a 3000 watt 220 => 110 stepdown transformer from Amazon. In reality the 2000 watt should be plenty, but I didn’t know that at the time and this was only £10 more.
I know a lot of people in the US are going with the Kreg table kit. That extra 4 inches would actually have made enough difference that space would have been too tight. I also needed to work around other things, like fitting a lawn mover under it, which the Kreg wouldn’t allow.
Add to that, the Kreg kit looked like it was about £300 without casters or top/base so I went with a self build option. The frame was all 2"x4", with parts glued and screwed together to make 4x4 for the legs. The top is basic plywood from B&Q @ £45 a sheet. It took fractionally more that one sheet the way I did it, but I had some spare to work with. The bottom shelf has 9mm ply for the surface.
Add some casters from Amazon for about £15 (will take 400kg) and then some height adjusting small legs (can be seen in the image above) for about £20 and that’s it. My garage floor slopes away so I had to raise the front left by about 10mm and the front right by about 35mm!
Total cost for this was around £170 plus the 9mm ply I already had. You can also see that I had a lot of 2x4 left over (in the front shelf).
Here is the basic frame before I added a couple of extra cross pieces where the top boards would join.
Here you can see why I had to custom build something myself!
The top was made up of 4’x2’ pieces stuck together because this is all I can get in my car. I used Dominoes to join them, but you could just as easily use dowels or other methods. After that I ran a flush trim bit around the edges and round over on the top to make it fit.
Add some rubber matting
With the machine (as above)
and dust collection…
