jgourlay

This is a great starting point. I REALLY wish FWW would do a whole series on "small parts with hand tools". Some examples. Need a thin piece, like a box side, that is to short and too thin to successfully/safely be thickness planed? How do you do that?

Or generating the strips he's cutting without a tablesaw? Narrow dados and rabbets with handtools in very thin stock?

People seemed very enthusiastic, but were they actually willing to drop some change?

BobMC nails a critical point: MOST of your "fine woodworkers" are hobbyists and with a wide spectrum of reasons for doing what they do. CNC will serve some, not others. For those that it won't serve, it won't serve because CNC is precluded by their purpose in woodworking. Those purposes are eternal.

Second, because of the nature of wood and the nature of the cutting tool, the best a CNC router will do in the "Coarse, Medium, Fine" stages is "Medium". I haven't seen a router bit (or ROS) yet that will give me the same surface on curly paduak that I get with a high angle smoother.

Third, I see one HUGE upside of CNC for the "traditional" woodworker. Consider this sequence on rough, twisted, cupped rosewod. 1. rip a relatively straight edge (times 4) 2. handplane those edges straight and generally plumb to an imaginary flat face plane (in reality we do this all the time). 3. NOW glue up your table top, twist, cup, bow, roughness and all 4. Clamp that puppy into your CNC router, pop a beer, and smile while your router JOINTS the table top in a single step. 5. flip it over, open up another fine ale and watch your CNC router obsolete your thickness planer.

In this sequence you STILL must bust out your finest high angle infill smoother, but you have PROFOUNDLY decreased the amount of time spent in jointing and thicknessing. Further, you really haven't added much time on the edge part: how many of us glue up table tops straight off the jointed edge? We almost all handplane that edge to shave off the ridges and make the joint disappear.