I called Carve Wright on January 3rd after seeing the CompuCarve ad during a Bowl Game and doing some research here on the net and seeing that it was out of stock on Sears.com. The woman I spoke with at Carve Wright was delightful and told me that Sears has priority on many new machines being built but that Carve Wright would also have an allotment. Even though Sears has priority (which of course it should as their mass marketer) she advised that the wait list might be long. She suggested I place an order with both (no credit card required with Carve Wright) and see which comes in first. Carve Wright would not charge sales tax but would charge shipping. I did that with her and went to the local Sears store the same day (January 3rd). After much confusion with the cash register dude, an older gentleman was called who understood what I wanted. He said he had seen one in a Maryland Sears store himself and it looked awesome but had not seen it in operation. When he got involved and typed the right stuff into the cash register computer, it said they were expecting one or more on January 7th (4 days later). I said, “yeah right, they are backordered all over the country. I’d like to order one.” So I did and they wanted full payment up front of $1,899 + tax ($2,064 - high for a hobby toy - ow well, my wife suggested it for my birthday present in March). Yesterday, January 9th I clicked on
www.sears.com to look at the machine ad again for some lusting looks and low and behold it is on sale this week (until January 13th) for $100 off at $1,799. Went back to the local Sears store last night. Once again dumbness at the cash register, but finally got someone to figure out that I had not ordered a $2,000 shop organizer. However, he said he would check in the back, which I thought was ridiculous. But low and behold he came out with the CompuCarve box on a hand truck. Wow! what a surprise. Got the $100 + tax ($119.49) price reduction and stuffed the box into the back seat of my 4-door Saturn SL-1 (yes the box is big but not huge). Must be my lucky week - should go buy a lottery ticket. It’s supposed to be my birthday present for March, but I’ve convinced my wife that I should check it out to make sure everything works under warrantee (*wink*). I’ll let you know if everything is in order with a later posting.
opcorn: ) then the next step would be to get that lumber to S4S and stick it into one of these nifty machines. I've been looking at CNC routers for years, waiting for the price to come down. Currently they are in the $10k range and dropping for lower end machines. But this little thing is less than $2k?... something I might be able to justify for my little business. I have no illusions that this will do what a larger CNC router will do, but much of what I wanted a CNC router for was small little logos/signs and patterns for tops of boxes and plaques etc. This looks like it will do that. I'd be worried about how much abuse it will take though. How powerful is that little motor... and how much would a replacement motor or positioning system cost. What is the warranty... after a large part of this machine is microprocessor driven as opposed to mostly electromechanical as most shop equipment is. Well... apparently it is pretty successful since everybody seems to be sold out of them. That means others will probably join the fray eventually.
