Thinking of buying one of these little things

[HankMcSpank]

Well you must have been nuts to pay £500 for second hand machine that is poorly designed and uses cheap nasty round rail. Also 16mm aluminium is far from chunky and whats the point if those relatively flimsy 16mm sides are attached with 5mm aluminium angle.!!!

You're right, instead I should have spent 3 years of evenings spec'ing sourcing & building. Some of the self build threads on here extend back to when Elvis could still visit the toilet without issue. Show me anywhere on the planet (webpage) you can buy a new machine with a similar spec.

I think you are still missing the point...ok, so you eat sleep breathe CNC machines, some folks just want to mill a pcb or a bit of acylic (it's akin to someone going into a car showroom asking about a ford fiesta for the school run & the salesman saying "pah, that thing won't carry girders, what you need is this Hummer")..& some folks don't want to spend yonks stroking their chin with a furrowed brow....I still reckon buying secondhand is viable - i.e. buy a modest secondhand cnc machine for £500...use it, sell it for £500....cost of ownership = £0 (re the machine I bought ...it's the most cost effective £500 I'll ever spend & for it's purpose - and as it whirrs its merry little way milling a pcb out, not once have I thought "Damn, if only I'd listened to those on mycncuk")

It was with a wry smile that I typed that you need a cnc machine to make a cnc machine (because even if that were solely the case, you'd likely need a bigger machine than the cnc you were making!)... but if you suck at engineering, it certainly eliminates the inaccuracies (holes slightly misplaced anyone?)

I'm a bit of a guitar buff...but I don't hang around on guitar forums insisting that all newcomers buy a parker if a yamaha pacifica is perfectly fine for their immediate needs... indeed it's more likely that I'd suggest buying a secondhand yamaha pacifica.....just sayin' (perhaps the CNC genre around these parts is a bit like a career in deep sea diving ...you start at the top & work your way down?)