New to all of this

Introductions
1

Hello all, Midlife crisis in full effect, moved to East Texas, and decided to try and make a living doing small scale fabrication. Not that I have ever done any major fab work. In the last 5 years, I have purchased nearly all needed to setup a real shop. Purchases from newest to oldest.

Crossfire Pro. Batch 2. All signs say June.

Hypertherm 45xp

xCarve CNC router

AHP alpha tig 200: still learing how to tig weld. There is a learning curve.

Smitthy Granet Max Mill/lathe combo (can be upgraded to CNC)

3d printer.

I cant wait to be free from having to work for others. I think I will start off doing signage to get seat time on all my CNC toys, before moving up. I still need to purchase a tubing bender, a vertical band saw, and a few other odds and ends to be fully set.

I look forward to being a part of this community and learning all the ins and outs.

Tim

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2

Welcome Tim, your off to a good start. Glade to have you here. Many good people in here to help you along when you get your pro set up.

3

Thanks, That is what it looks like. I roamed the forum before making the decision to go with the LS. Also decided up front, that it made more sense to wait on the PRO system, then start with the regular or xl unit, just to want to upgrade in 3 months. :slight_smile:

4

Welcome. I’m glad to see so many just starting out. I’m new to the metal fabrication side also. Done a little here and there, mostly body panels for cars. Can’t wait to get creative!

How do you like your xCarve?

5

Thank you. It’s something that I have always wanted to do, but never committed the resources until now. Spent my whole life in the collision industry. I love the x carve. I really need more seat time with it. But it is a well built machine, especially considering the price point, and the user forum is amazing.

6

You might want to consider a horizontal band saw for metalwork. It’s really useful to drop it down on a straight cut and have the cut proceed at its own speed vs trying to manually feed the stock into a vertical band saw. Really handy for bar & tubing stock. A HF one isn’t incredibly expensive and good enough. We use one for the robotics team with a bunch of high school aged kids for several years and they’re not big on finesse & care and feeding of the tools they use :slightly_smiling_face:

7

That is actually what I meant. I was not paying attention when I was typing. Lol. Super excited to get my new machine and actually make some things!

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