Save the Machinists

[gmac]

To all the people who are thinking about spending hard earned $ on a shoptask - Please do your homework and read up on all their quality issues BEFORE you send your hard earned $ to JT or any others selling this line of "machines." This is from a conversation overheard recently on this brand --these arent career 'bashers', just people who are hobbyists in the same line of intersts that hate to see others get treated badly because they believed soembody in "business" that turned out to be a fraud.

"I looked around a good amount about 4 years ago and thought this was a decent machine, although they had a bunch of upgrades coming along about every 3-6 months, always for more $ and more delays. I read up on the forums ( delphi and others) that were there and found a precious few that said anything about any problems.. hmmm... is this machine really that new that nobody has anything to say but good things??? I discovered that bad nesws disappered really fast whenever I found it. Later on I find that a certain individual is using all available means to supress anything bad that anybody says about the product line - all the way to claiming the owners did intentional damage to the machines.

Since then I have read a good deal about the brand, and have put more money in other places where Im just as happy with what I got and I dont have to go begging for the seller to do what he promised all along. As I read more and more about them I see the situation getting a LOT WORSE and I am ever so glad I dont have one that I need to go work on even more to get it to drill a hole. Im not interesting in spending that much dough for a KIT of badly fitted parts that I have to repair and go BUY NEWparts for to get it to work.

Companies that do this kind of thing are frauds who knowingly produce and sell nonperformng merchandise and should be sued until they cant stay in business anymore because people wont stop suing them and taking thier money and their stuff away to pay for their fraudulent behavior. this is not the opinion of XXXXXXX or anybody else, just mine.

Many good american firms went out of business due to bad times, bad practices, or bad luck. Its time for them to bite the bullet and produce the quality product they are promising or to go AWAY under many lawsuits. that includes personal liability for those who make the empty promises, take the honest money and then deliver the damaged, nonperforming, mis-assembled, and non-quality tested items. its just plain garbage at some point that they keep doing this and we should stop accepting it from these thieves. the people who read there ( bulletin boards) should take advantage of their rights and post the address of a lawyer who can take their cases to the right place to make this company pay up for its many bad performances- thats the way things are supposed to work here in USA - isnt it??. nnnnn hates to see honest peole screwed so badly and just done over and over by this company.

JJJJ's not a big fan of three-in-ones but hes not bashing them at all by any means - smithy and others make a reasonable product and they fit OK with the needs of many people for hobby uses and tiny shop work in basements and garages. it's ridiculous to think that a person should have to put up wtih all the guff and lies from ST to get the kind of a machine that can go to work right out of the box- theirs have shown that they cant do it. Just run them out if they cant do honest business and be done with them. they will soon be worth more as parts than as a working machine then, and we all wont have to put up with their liars and their fraudulent practices. this country has had enough of this, time to make an end of it. we see greatly improving quality in many machine tools imports, chinese included, so why cant the american people get their piece of what they want for a fair $?? greed and lies for garbage products - thats why. time to take out the trash. there is certainly room in that market for honst business producers building a decent quality product. the tormach and other desktop sizes of hand machines and CNC are going great guns and they should be - people found a decent product that performs the way it says it will."

I have no doubt that time will catch up with them but it may take a lot more disappointed people's money before it happens. make sure you know what you are gambling with here before you hand any $ over to them. "people like that - they dont gamble except to bet when the next sucker is born."

[digitalmdj]

I agree with you because I have that very same problem. I don't think their is one thing on my machine that could be called precision. We were promised it would be but not one person can say that truthfully. I would like to hear one person say they got a spindle runout less than one thousands from the factory. The more you get into this machine the worse it gets. They just didn't care how they put this machine together. And JT does't have any morals to sell a machine like this and right out lie about it. He wanted the bad housing back so bad he paid to ship it back. I already took pictures of it and I had the second cracked casting anyway so it did him no good to try and hide the fact he welded on the bottom of the casting to hide the hole from a casting flaw. They didn't even clean out the gearbox after they attempted to hide the flaw. All the oil leaked out after a week . And it never ran once because the grit was in the spindle bearings and the second and third shafts were bound up.

[norvil1]

i bought a fully loaded tri-power and i dont think the machine precision i was promised was what i received. i will never trust or buy from shoptask again.

[sharpshooter90]

Our machine held 0.0005" on the spindle and did a great job on our scopes. Thats a lot better than we expected from a 3 in 1 machine.

[gmac]

I have chinese and other imported items that work fine also. I have seen numerous ones that are clearly a mistake to expect high quality from the tool of the obvious poor quality of construction, design, qualitycontrol at the factory, etc. My reasoning is to treat them like what they appear to be - if it acts and appears to be a low-grade tool then expect to pay a low-grade price and tolerate the low-grade performance. if you get better performance under special circumstances then fine, but if you are promised better and its not delivered then its NOT OK to be treated like you are the fool. I have low-quality wrenches that do a 100% job of turning a nut some of the time and they are fine for that. I dont expect them to handle the especially difficult things with the same quality as an american built factory-duty tool. I pay the price for what I need but if I dont get the performance that was promised then I dont care what I paid - I got LIES and not performance. theres no reason that a bad product supplier should get away with that any more than a higher quality one and it is certainly no excuse for a poor quality product or provider to masquerade as something else just so they can jack up their prices for the same crap quality. thats fraud, not selling - real selling includes delivery of the performance that was promised. thats an american tradition of solid quality that is laughed at around the PacRim - ' look what those stupid americans will pay for this crap- that our own people including shops and factories wont even think of paying good money for.' dont be a stupid american- put your money where the performance is and dont gamble on trying to get them to behave like an american firm who wanted to stay in honest business would be expected to.

[toastydeath]

I'm curious - What promises, exactly, were made? Specific tolerances, numbers, what?

[smallblock]

I have had great results with my old Shoptask and so far am pretty impressed with the patriot. I can't figure out if this GMAC guy actually bought a machine or just busted his knuckles on a chinese crescent wrench- his name makes me think he's an unemployed auto worker.

[digitalmdj]

It is suppose to be within .0005 . And Sharpshooter is lying if he said it did that right out of the box. Alot of people can't get below .002 on their best day and lots of money later. Smallblock you haven't even used your machine yet have you. Let see some pictures of something you machined. Better yet your machine set up in you garage.

[svenakela]

Originally Posted by digitalmdj It is suppose to be within .0005 . And Sharpshooter is lying if he said it did that right out of the box. Alot of people can't get below .002 on their best day and lots of money later. Smallblock you haven't even used your machine yet have you. Let see some pictures of something you machined. Better yet your machine set up in you garage.

And who are you to say that?

[toastydeath]

Where's the spec sheet/website that says it's accurate to .0005"?

[digitalmdj]

I believe Norvil can answer that one. We talked on the phone. JT told him that when he bought his shoptask . That it would be within .0005 runout. Well Norvil is real mad at JT because it didn't even come close to that.

Q. What kind of accuracy can I expect with the PATRIOT?

A. The PATRIOT is designed to CNC specifications, and is the only 3 in 1 machine that carries this exclusive designation on its factory certification as well as the important ISO 9001 production quality certification.. Others claim " CNC kits" or " CNC conversions", but only the PATRIOT is 100% factory designed for CNC drive. There are too many specifications to list, but lathe spindle runout at the ground face will be about 0.0005". Other specifications are to similar high standards. When properly adjusted and operated, the PATRIOT can produce quality work better than any machine in its class. Of course, the ultimate factor in any work will be the skill of the operator.

The is under FAQ if you can't find it . It seem you haven't read everthing on the site. But thats not the problem it's at the tail stock you have all the problems .

[toastydeath]

I'm still confused.

The spindle runout on the face is not .0005? What exactly was the number, and how was it measured? And who cares about axial runout in a HSM application? That's like, the most irrelevant measurement I could ever take on a machine tool. Plus, they say "around .0005," which means it could be any number at all. It's not like they're giving you a tolerance here.

Nothing else is claimed on that website. They don't specify any sort of radial runout, cylindricity over a length, tailstock alignment, etc. Which are all numbers a person WOULD care about. All they specify is total indicated reading of the spindle face.

Was there some sort of oral agreement with specific numbers with specific tolerances given?

I'm really confused as to what you are complaining about. There's not even a spec sheet, much less maximum deviation. Sure, the machine may be crap. But there's nothing there that I can look at and say they're in the wrong. There's no number specifying the straightness of the Z axis, or the perpendicularity of X, or radial runout, or tailstock alignment, or parallelism of the spindle to Z, or anything else.

You can't buy something with no spec sheet and then complain it doesn't meet spec.