Buying Printrbot CNC

[accuprintr]

I just checked Printrbot Labs website and Crawlbot and Printrbot CNC are no longer available for sale. Does anyone know if they are going to become available?

[ChefScott]

Still there, but listed as related products to the other "lab" items when you click on one of them.

[Mooselake]

You might consider either a or an (which is really a slightly juiced up Shapeoko 2. The X-Carve currently has more expansion capabilities, Ed's dealing with keeping up with sales for the initial SO3 and (the last time I looked) hasn't had time to work on expansion packs.

Edward Ford designed the Shapeoko while working his day job, got hired by inventables and designed the SO2 (I think it was that order, maybe he did the SO2 then Inventables), left Inventables and designed the SO3. I've corresponded with Ed a number of times over the last few years, he's a good guy. When some more space opens up in the Mooseshop an expanded SO3 is pretty high on the list things to fill it with (although it'll have to duke it out with a CNC'd G0704...).

Not knocking PB's design, which looks pretty good, but PB seems to spread themselves a bit too thin, and I'd wonder what the future of the CNCand other non-3D printer products are. They're still having QA problems with their 3D printers and controllers, and there's been several customers "fired" lately because of too many tickets. While it's likely there's legitimate issues on both sides of that item that we'll never know, it does raise a flag. A new design CNC router has the potential for a lot of tickets...

Kirk

[accuprintr]

I've read reviews of Shapeoko 3 and X-Carve in the make magazine and both seem to be great options. I don't like that I need to buy a router for Shapeoko 3, which makes it feel like the product is not finished. I was one of the customers fired by Printrbot, but I still like their printers. I am a software engineer by trade, but I graduated with BS in hardware engineering. I always like playing around with hardware. Printrbot is much more expensive than listed in Make Magazine - $1499 in article, $2999 in real life. I've played around with Chinese laser cutters and they die fairly fast. I think all of the young companies don't have time to provide proper customer support. I was working in a start up myself and the pace is blazingly fast - you are trying to develop a new product and fix some of the worst bugs, but development takes priority.