Was about to get a toy- then I did some research...

[NeoMorph]

Here we go again.! . . . Have you ever built or used a belt-driven machine.?
For a small router, (or even a basic large machine) then belt drive is a very good solution with high efficiency and low backlash that's reasonably cheap and easy. Yes, maybe not ball screw good but much better than other methods like R&P or cheap leap screws if done correctly. . . . .Don't knock it until you've tried it.!

100% agree.

Double belting reduces a lot of the stretch too. I glued my lower belt to the aluminium and it really improved the accuracy too.

It all depends on what materials you want to work with. Woods and plastics and cast aluminium (yeah, ALWAYS go with cast if you don’t want to get tons of aluminium welding to your endmills) then belt driven machines are great for learning the ins and outs of CNC... plus it’s cheaper to fix if you have a horrible crash that would warp the screws and ways of a non-belt driven machine.

I had one incident where a glitch decided to rapid in the long axis (X axis on my machine) at crazy speed and it slammed into the limit sensors (thank god I put them in spring mounted blocks) before ramming the hard limits. Then it was skipping gears before the limit switch went “eh what.. WHAT THE F???” Before shutting the machine down.

That’s not so say it was slow to respond... it was just that the incident developed so darn fast that it accelerated into the stops like a crash test dummy machine. If it had been a screw driven machine I would be looking at stripping the whole thing down due to warp... and the cause? A glitch in the gcode plus me messing with the X max rate and inputting 1500000 instead of 1500.000.

CNC baby steps. Belt driven machines are good to learn on as replacing belts is cheaper than replacing ball screws. Now imagine that crash happening to a screw driven machine???? 😱🤯🤬

Butttttt... don’t think that the eBay machines are good value unless you are ready to possibly throw away all that money. Better to buy a machine from a reputable seller in your country who can help.

It may cost a little more but if anything goes wrong they are there to help. I had a bad CNC xPro controller which was exchanged after trying to get it working with the supplier. No cost to me... and sorted FAST!