[MetDetect]

Hi all,

CNC kit saga...

Well I had a choice a couple months ago, buy a turn on and go cnc mill like the CNC junior or buy a kit for a better quality mill and save a few bucks by doing the work myself. I opted for the kit but in the end didn't save any money as costs ballooned to around $5,500.

Today was day 40 of installing the kit that was only supposed to take the average person as little as a day to install... and I'm not done yet. Well take off 10 days for electrical work and I'm still 30 days working on the mechanicals. So what's the hold up right?

I guess my vision of a kit was quite different from the manufacture. I had ensured that this kit had actually been installed on the specific mill I purchased, in fact I purchased the mill they recommended as best for their kit. I thought this would all just bolt right on and I'd be up and running in a week or so.

I ran into issues not minutes after unpacking the kit from the boxes when I found some parts in the kit that were supposed to fit together did not. I used a grinder and file to fix these but thought I really should not have to be spending time fixing the kit before installing it. I shrugged it off at the time but later would realize this was a hint of things to come.

Thats pretty much the way things have gone, try to install a part, find a problem, remove the part, fix the problem. Tonight it was a limit switch, installed the part and the table would no longer move. Looked things over and noticed the spacer was overlapping and clamping against the table, removed it, tried to hog out the slotted hole as best I could to lower it below the table and after a couple tries it didn't look pretty but its bolted on.

The night before it was coming up 18 inches short of the supplied foam seal and the night before that it was missing radial bearings which I had to buy at my own cost and the night before that it was the z axis shaft being too long and the night before that it was...well you get the picture. Its like its been fighting every step of the way.

Instructions have been the other significant delay, they are at times just incomplete with continue to section B followed by "coming soon" but most often lack enough detail to get you through a task without questions so you have to think way too much about what to do. Sometimes they are just wrong and the procedure just doesn't fit the particular mill.

Lastly I have been disappointed with the quality, its not 1 or 2 parts but many parts that seem to me to have been machined in a hurry up fashion. Spacers that are not cut square or bored so that they stack evenly. Tooling gouges, bolt slots you have to beat the bolt into, mounts that are not bored in the center, screws that do not turn true. Perhaps I'm being picky but when I spend a few thousand dollars I don't like looking at parts that look sloppy and out of square. I'm sure they will meet their designed task but for example one mount had two bolt flanges, one was .100 shorter than the other and so the bolts stuck out the other side of the saddle and I had to buy shorter bolts. Its that kind of thing that erodes overall confidence in the product.

Support was initially excellent however at this point I'm probably the last person they want to hear from and vise versa. I don't know what I'll have when I'm finished, hopefully a cnc mill that works well but if I were starting over I might well go with a turn on and go machine even if it was a lesser quality mill, my experience with a kit has not been a good one.