wish i would have bought a tormach

[bob b]

hi i am a newbie to this site but i think i made a mistake but not getting a tormach bought a novakon 145 your support and blogs are so much more informative i am still waiting on things from march when i got machine i am sure they are all basically the same. I sure hope i can figure mine out slowly doing so have alot of tormach tooling love it thanks again for letting me vent

[MichaelHenry]

hi i am a newbie to this site but i think i made a mistake but not getting a tormach bought a novakon 145 your support and blogs are so much more informative i am still waiting on things from march when i got machine i am sure they are all basically the same. I sure hope i can figure mine out slowly doing so have alot of tormach tooling love it thanks again for letting me vent

My sympathies on the pain you seem to be going through. Making the right purchase decision on items like this can be difficult. Maybe you should consider selling your mill and buying a Tormach.

It looks like the company is either discontinuing their NM-145 or upgrading it as they have the current stock on sale for about 40% off. No warranty with the sale units, so that could mean discontinued. If so, the value could drop pretty fast and selling now might be less painful than waiting. Just a thought.

Mike

[TXFred]

The only thing that's really an unknown is the electronics, right? The rest is just stepper motors, linear rails, and Mach3 to run it.

If worse comes to worse, you can gut the electronics, install Gecko Drives, and have a mill that a lot of people will understand how to diagnose.

I'm not recommending it now, but if things don't work out well, it's an option.

Frederic

[concombrefrais]

Fred has a good point here, as long as the electronic works you should be ok with your novakon. But if I remember well, the 145 comes with geckos already so you really should be fine. You may have a few quirks to work out and you may bang your head a few times on a couple of issues but then it should perform pretty much as a Tormach.
Good luck and enjoy!

[C*H*U*D]

...your support and blogs are so much more informative ...

This was one deciding factor for me when I got my Tormach. I watched all the other sections and they usually had 6-10 people viewing them at any given time. The Tormach section usually has 30-40 people viewing (right now it's 45). I decided to go with what I thought had the best support.

[MichaelHenry]

Fred has a good point here, as long as the electronic works you should be ok with your novakon. But if I remember well, the 145 comes with geckos already so you really should be fine. You may have a few quirks to work out and you may bang your head a few times on a couple of issues but then it should perform pretty much as a Tormach.
Good luck and enjoy!

I could be wrong, but it sounded like there several on the forum that were having spindle problems too and that are now looking putting in their own 3-phase motor and VFD. That gets a bit pricey unless you are a good scrounger.

To paraphrase what someone recently wrote: "Do you want the mill to be your project or the tool for your projects?"

Mike