New Member North Yorkshire... Struggling!

[Neale]

Just as a data point, my 1500x750 router cost around £2500 in parts - and a couple of years to build, but I am a slow builder...

A friend who runs a small business decided that a ready-built machine from China would be the way to go as he would rather earn money than build machines. He ended up with a 900x600 machine from Acctek. With water-cooled spindle, it ended up at about £3K delivered in UK. He saved some money by using a UK shipping agent to organise delivery, and probably had a better service as a result. The Acctek machine isn't perfect, it needed a bit of tweaking to set up, and there are quite a lot of rough edges. On the other hand, it is built with cast iron and steel rather than aluminium, has reasonable if not ideal electronics, and it was up and running, delivering production jobs, a couple of days after arriving in the workshop, earning its keep for around 6 months now. There may be other cheaper/better machines around, but this is one that I have seen and touched (I did the software setup and configuration) and it seems to deliver.

Again, a data point rather than a solid recommendation, but you should be able to get something that suits your needs for about your budget.

I now leave the thread open to all the "you'll do better if you build it!" advice - and I agree with that view, if your pleasure is in building at least as much as using! I had a lot of fun building, setting up, and now using my own machine.