Quote Originally Posted by boldford View Post
Perhaps the panel would like to express their view on how these machines would handle Sika modelling board. I'll be more than happy to exchange notes with the original poster as I'm seriously thinking about one of these machines.
It won't have any trouble at all handling modeling board from a mechanical strength point. Where it will struggle is with obtaining the correct feed rate to give best results IE Finish and tool life with some materials.

With only a 5mm pitch screws and I would hazard guess an under sized power supply along with crappy drives mixed and compounded with other aspects of the design and build quality then you'll be under 4mtr/min of usable cutting speed (Not to be confused with rapid feed). Which for most plastics and softer materials, even most woods, would be considered on the low side for feed rate. Cutting too slow will give a poor finish resulting in edge burning on some materials like balsa wood or thin ply plus greatly shorten the tool life.

This is where so meny new folks fall foul and don't see the potential problems with machines like this.! They think because they only want to cutt soft materials it won't be a problem.?
The reallity is that soft materials often need high feed rates for reasons stated earlier and these machines struggle to run at these high feed rates.
If pushed to run at there max they wear out very quickly drasticly reducing the machines life. The quality and accurecy is reduced because the poor gantry design can't handle the high lateral inertial loads without flexing and basicly they are just not built or spec'd to do the high feeds required.

My experience is that those that buy this type of machine while at first think they are ok but soon start to realise there down sides resutling in several different out comes.
1: Struggle with it, working around it's limits and bad points untill it becomes so annoying or restrictive they build/buy there dream machine.
2: Struggle with it, working around it's limits and bad points untill it becomes so annoying or restrictive they try to upgrade it and blow even more money trying to turn a sows ear into silk purse. (never achieved)
3: Instantly see it's bad points and get rid (Often they've had a little cnc experience before but got caught trying to take the quick cheap upgrade route)
4: Don't realise and just think cnc rubbish and either go back to the old way of doing it or give up on it all together.
5: Don't realise blissfully unaware producing crappy work and burning cutters up thinking thats just the way it is.!! . . .Untill one day they see a good machine strut it's stuff and then penny drops or they realise it's not them doing something wrong.

In most all cases they are well pissed off in the end.!!