About to take the plunge

[Neale]

Chris - first time, I think, that I have heard Acctek mentioned here. A friend of mine who runs a small business making notice boards and similar wanted a router to bring engraving and similar jobs "in house" as he had been sub-contracting this part of the work. However, he wanted more control of costs and quality, so decided to buy a machine of his own. He did consider building and had a look at my router but as this was for business and he already had a backlog of work to do on it, went for the Acctek machine. He found them good to deal with, did a lot of negotiation over spec via Skype, and ended up with one of the 6090 variants. He did go for a water-cooled 2.2KW spindle, not for the extra power but because it can take 13mm shank cutters. For example, on my own machine I have a 2" cutter with 1/2" shank that I use for light surfacing jobs, which can be very useful.

He also arranged his own transport using a UK shipping agent who took care of all the details, VAT, import duty, etc, for what was apparently a very reasonable price. Not sure who he used.

The machine took a little bit of setting up, but given that it had been in a container from China this isn't too surprising. I was able to help him with Mach3 (he bought his own licence to avoid some of the Chinese-sourced Mach3 issues like "demo licence only") which would have given him problems. For example, you have to install the touchplate support code and the instructions aren't too straightforward to follow, you need to figure out home positions and configure accordingly. However, it did come with a USB-connected external motion controller which meant that he could use a cheap old PC to drive it - no PC performance problems.

Overall, mechanically, it does the job. There are quite a few rough edges, paintwork is OK but not brilliant, some holes look as if they were drilled freehand, etc, but it worked. Only real problem was that the gantry axis home switch did not operate. We took the covers off and found that the trigger for the proximity switch was, literally, a broken tap screwed into the mounting hole complete with locknut, but it was badly out of adjustment. Can't have even worked in the factory, and I can't see how that vibrated into the hole and relocked its locknut in transit! Tweaked it, relocked nut, and it's been working fine since. Overall, then, not a perfect machine but for the price, it works and is rather more solidly built than some of the machines you mention.

Good luck!