Comment by 1-more
6 hours ago
What's kind of funny about CNC is there is a wood working tool that is the opposite of what you just mentioned. The Shaper Origin is a CNC router where the gross movements of the router are provided by the human operator's hands moving the thing, and the fine movements of the cutting head inside the router body are provided by XYZ positioning of the cutting head reacting to the machine's position over the workpiece using optical tracking. So you can get precision and an expansive work range, with a small footprint of the tool.
I think that is more for space/budget reasons than really being a preferred way to work. One thing is handy for is being able to carve something in place though. I saw someone use it to do inlays in the middle of a large plank tabletop that would have required a truly huge CNC machine to be able to hold the plank.