On Tuesday October 21st at 8am CST Inventables launched a Kickstarter campaign for Carvey a new, remarkably easy to use, tabletop 3D carving machine for making ideas into real objects. I'm proud to say we hit our goal in 1 hour and 26 minutes!
The response for the community has been beyond belief. Thank you so much for all of the support for the Carvey project. We are so grateful. There have been some technical questions in the comments section about how precise Carvey is. We want to be as responsive as possible to the questions. In this video Chief Engineer Bart Dring uses a dial indicator that has 0.0005" accuracy. The dial indicator was bolted to the waste board on Carvey. He measures the X, Y, and Z axis to determine the precision and repeatability of the machine.
In the technical specifications we promised:
- Run out .0006"
- Resolution .001"
Our measurements on the actual machine are:
- Run out .0004"
- Repeatability on X: 0.0005"
- Repeatability on Y: 0.0005"
- Repeatability on Z: 0.0005"
*In the original post we stated repeatability on X and Y were 0. The use of significant digits was wrong. If you measure something with a wooden ruler and it is an inch wide you say 1 inch. If you measure with a caliper you might say 1.000 inch. Saying "0' implies it could be rounded by as much as 0.500"
While the eye can see the pointer only moved about a 1/5th of a tick on the scale, that does not mean the tool is that accurate.
The accuracy number I always give is 0.001 to 0.003. We do not guarantee all units will leave the factory at 0.001 on all axes.
There are also some questions about how well Carvey cuts soft metals like Aluminum. In our next update, we're going to film a series of videos to show this process so stay tuned! Thanks again for all your support and keep your questions coming!