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The Vectric User Group Meeting was held in San Diego this year after the pandemic postponed in-person meetings these past few years. While 2021’s online event was a success and brought above average numbers of attendees to tune in, it’s always nice to interact with everyone in-person.

At this year’s meeting, several CNC companies, a laser accessory company, and long-time Vectric users had booth space in the hotel’s gallery.

ShopBot showed up big this year with a booth full of samples of all kinds, a ShopBot Desktop MAX CNC tool air-cutting sample guitar fretboards and displaying a Harry Potter-style wand in the Rotary Indexer, as well as our featured project designed and built by Bill Young, a retro arcade machine made of plywood that is assembled with click-together joinery and no hardware whatsoever. It's a great flat-pack project!

The arcade machine displayed a slideshow featuring Vectric software-created ShopBot CNC projects. The joystick and buttons allowed the guests to move photos and videos back and forth as they pleased. Clever, and a ton of fun! It’s safe to say that most of us at ShopBot wouldn’t mind having one of these cabinets at our homes.

Vectric started the conference sharing new features of version 11.5 of VCarve and Aspire software that is now available. Check out their website and social media for details on new features.

As a lifelong musician, I especially appreciated the presentation by Tim Sway. Tim’s guitars and basses are super unique designs created with recycled materials. For his presentation he came up with a partible guitar amplifier cabinet that everyone can easily cut on their CNC at home and suggested where to source cheap and recycled materials. 

Other presentations included info on epoxy and wood inlay techniques, step-by-step project tutorials utilizing new features of VCarve and Aspire, wood finishing options for your CNC projects, and more. Next year’s event is slated to be online, so mark your calendars, register early, and enjoy! The Vectric meetings are always full of helpful info.