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)

[Boyan Silyavski]

(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)

I have thought of that many times. I have some near future aspirations about building and/or selling small commercial machines, that's why i have "meditated" a lot on importing versus building. Its a big NO for me.
Cause its not the only the problem they have. Its true i could not beat Chinese offering for the same money the same quantity of surfaced steel, big vacuum tables and similar stuff. But from what i have seen they have other inherent mistakes integrated in them, some important details overlooked and so on.
So i can and will make 10 times more useful machine in real life than a crappy Chinese router.

So any machine that sb makes here at the forum, using the advice of more experienced members and if he does not cut corners will be far better than ready made in China.


I don't want to insult any body here personally but i believe many people here, at other forums and generally call "machines" something which i openly call "crap".
For me anything less than using square supported rails is crap. Not because of what rails is using but because of the constant desire of some people to overrate and sell you something that could not really do precisely the job its stated to do and that type of people usually don't use square supported rails :-).

So for me crap is if you say that machine does aluminum and it could not do, to say its precision and its not and so on...

[HankMcSpank]

To be clear ...what I'm saying is that not everyone wants to mill steel, or even mill aluminium ( plenty of folk just want to mill acrylic, wood or make pcbs etc.)

Also not everyone wants to make this a lifestyle (most come to the genre because they need a CNC machine, not just wanting to fill a bit of time in)

Therefore if your CNC needs are modest... I'm just saying that buying a reasonably spec'ed secondhand machine is a viable option ....I'm doing fine pitch SMD pcbs & have zero accuracy problems - but then again don't ask me to mill a aluminium spindle bracket (even though my machine probably could - slowly!) .... I didn't buy my machine for that.

Like I say...it depends on what your ultimate goal is......new users coming to the forum might get deflated at the constant barrage of diss'ing of anything but the most highly spec'ed of machines. Coming back to the first video that inspired me about the possibilities of a simple CNC machine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6drMZqmyXQc ) .....of course, it a very very basic machine, but if you're only after very very basic pcb, it may be the gateway to getting into CNC'ing (i.e. where a person - when faced with the cost of going 'pucka' - might have walked away otherwise)

One man's 'crap' is another man's 'perfection' ...we're all different, with different levels of expectations, budgets & timeframes.

the CNC machine you buy as your first machine, needn't be 'for life' ...there's an incredibly healthy market for secondhand machines, so the losses incurred by buying secondhand & then selling on secondhand are minimal....if I had my time again, I'd have bypassed all the heartache & just bought one.

[JAZZCNC]

if I had my time again, I'd have bypassed all the heartache & just bought one.[/COLOR]

The reason you had heartache in the first place is due to buying crap and penny pinching.!! . . . Simple truth is that if you want a decent machine it costs a certain amount of money to do it right. Trying to build on the cheap is false economy with same outcome every time.!! . . . Heartache.