@F I picked the V90 mostly on price. Didn’t want to spend all my time figuring out how to build one from scratch, and this one should be able to handle acrylic and thin aluminum plate. Plus, I already had a Dremel and this thing comes with a mount for that – good enough at least for learning. It’s twice as large as what I was looking for, but ok.

@SF Thanks for the fiberglass warning. I’m still thinking about some sort of enclosure to keep the dust out of the garage – that’s the big drawback of the subtractive process: a lot of debris & waste!

@S I’ll post my progress. Still lots of assembly to do, and then the big task of figuring out how to create and transfer designs to actual material. Hope to have some object by the end of the month.

@PF Heh. Pick-and-place would be a very ambitious / big project. First challenge would be how to pick up and align parts – I have no idea. Solder paste is less complex, but I need to figure out how to apply paste. I’m actually thinking of using the V90 to create a smaller and much lighter X-Y axis platform to experiment with solder paste on my desktop. The V90 needs to move to the garage before the dusty part starts, and that’s going to be a pretty cold place in the winter months ahead.

Safety note: PCB fiberglass dust is very very bad for you. You don’t want it on your skin, and most certainly not in your lungs (think “asbestos”) I hope you are planning a vacuum system to pull the dust out of your workspace and catch it in some sort of filter outside.