Thinking of buying one of these little things

[HankMcSpank]

While most round these parts, enjoy the thrill of the chase (spec'ing, designing, scouring the net for the best price, arguing the toss etc)...others are time poor...or in my case, I just plain suck using hand tools! (young children wince when they see the results of my efforts - hot glue features a lot in my world)

I built my first CNC machine from discarded scaffolding pipe & old industrial type dot matrix printer parts (I kid you not, inspired by the this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6drMZqmyXQc), go on have a laugh at my expense - http://postimg.cc/image/wc413rthl/ (look at the frame - scaffolding!)..... Of course, it was terrible ....engraving warm chocolate would have been my dream! (it did actually engrave pcbs ...but very large track PCBs!) But I learnt a lot & (in retrospect) it was sort of fun.

I decided I needed more accuracy, and since that could not be obtained by a bloke of my ineptitude, I ponied up for one of these...

http://www.ogowell.com/images/CNC%20...her-2117-A.jpg

...it was dinky, used bog standard threaded rod - erhm not not good for pcbs...too much of the old backlash (there's a theme here & up until now, it goes roughly "I'm firkin' clueless me")

So I stacked my hand & waited, and waited....& then struck on a secondhand machine on ebay identical to this...

http://i00.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/127...il_RS_3020.jpg (moving table design...pretty rare on Ebay - it also came fitted with homing switches, which is a bonus for repeat-ability...cos frankly they're a pain to fit)

...& do you know what? It's good (the spec is reasonable, it's rigid, I bought a cnc-usb card...& have never looked back).

Sure it'll not mill steel, even ali is going to be a bit of a stretch, but for my needs (acrylic & pcbs) it's excellent ...better still it only cost me £500 .....I don't know how much you value your time, but if I had my time over again, I'd not have ever bothered wasting hours, upon hours (my mind boggles at how much time I spent on reading about all the ingredients needed), trying to spec/build my own....and even if I had, it would never have met the expectations of this lot!

So my top tip is *unless* you are going to make this a lifestyle choice, just pony up for a decent secondhand one (or pay a forum regular to build you one!)

Horses for courses ...

(for what it's worth, I think there's a gap in the market for someone to import chinese machines, address their weak points (normally the electronics) & re-sell them with english support....clearly stating their limitations ...there are plenty of folks who want to buy such machines, but are left to wing it solo trying to sort all the associated problems - not ideal, when you're clueless due to being a noob)