Quote Originally Posted by FlyHighRC View Post
Well CNC 1 has been on youtube and seems to go through aluminium fairly easily..6mm 6061 alloy and seems to do it in very little passes. If i wanted to build my own are there any build videos of a known machine where the parts are easy to findbuy and assemble? Id imagine getting the thing tuned would be a bi*ch.

Yeah I am into FPV. I Design Quadcopters mostly. I do love flying FPV and also do allot of survey work
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Smoke and Mirrors.!! . . Yes they show it cutting aluminium but what they don't show or tell you is how much it takes out the machine.!
Cutting aluminium correctly needs a much stronger spec machine than any of these. Most machines will scratch Aluminiun away but to cut it correctly and accurately requires rigidity and NONE of these have enough to cut aluminium to any decent standard and survive. They will even struggle on cutting hardwoods at deep depths and decent feed rates.

My advice as usual is to save up a little and build your own or save up a lot and by something much better. The reality is that there isn't anything available to buy off the shelf much under 2.5K that is worth bothering with. The 6040 and these cheap Kits etc are just hassle and false economy, they under perform, break down wear out very quickly if pushed hard, even when not pushed hard they can be fickle things.!

The other thing you need to be aware of is the feed and speeds, Soft materials require higher feed rates and these cheap machines with poor under spec'd components and electronics often can't reach the correct feed rates to give good finish and tool life. If they do manage to reach them then they are often performing at Max capabilitys which puts them under excess stress, at best this leads to inaccuracy and missed steps but worse than that it shortens there life span very quickly.