Originally Posted by
dynamotive
I visited Mikini, in Watsonville, to look at the 1610L. Phil gave me about an hour and a half lecture on the machine. I’m no expert on CNC machines, but it looks very good, and it seems like they are making a serious effort to produce a quality product. I guess you could say that the machine looks like a scaled-down Hass mini-VMC, and like that machine, it uses linear bearing ways for speed and accuracy, and a Z-axis drive instead of a spindle (which means you get the full 16” Z travel). Phil said that the mill provides about 80% of the Haas’ capability for less than half the price. I watched him machine a steel plate with a carbide mill, and it buzzed right through it, no problem. The enclosure is very nice-looking, and the whole machine looks very good. The whole base, right down to the floor, is cast iron, which seems like it makes the machine much more rigid. It weighs 2,000 pounds, which makes shipping somewhat easier, and it can run off of a 20-amp 220 single-phase outlet. As a matter of fact, with the right plug, you can plug it into the dryer socket in your garage. It has a three horsepower tooth-belt drive motor, which seems like plenty to me. The motor has a special controller, so spindle speed programming should be easy.
The base machine doesn’t come with a CNC controller. What it has is a ‘controller’ with a 4-axis display (XYZA) on the front and a pendant which allows you to use it in manual mode. All you have to do is add a computer and (the recommended) Mach 3, and you’re ready for CNC. Your LCD monitor sits on top of the enclosure, and there’s a shelf for the keyboard. As an option, you can buy an ‘integrated controller’, which uses (he said) an industrial-quality mini-ITX motherboard. It fits in the back, all ready to go. The base machine uses steppers, and it comes with three stepper drivers which look very much like Gecko drives. There’s a place to connect the fourth one, of course. I said to him, what happens if you disappear? Can these drives be replaced with Gecko drives? He said, very easily. Since the machine in general doesn’t seem terribly complex, keeping it going shouldn’t be a problem. Servos are available as an option, although the steppers are undoubtedly just fine.
I asked him about the 4th axis rotary table, which is something I’m very interested in. He said that they are planning on offering it as an option, but the problem is providing something that is accurate enough at a reasonable price. Regular rotary tables just don’t cut it in angular rotation accuracy, because the worm is inherently sloppy. They have been experimenting with a special 6” Phase II rotary table, with some sort of better worm drive, and he said it should be available soon.
To me, the machine looks like an attempt to create a low-cost VMC that uses as many non-proprietary elements as possible, but which still has fairly high standards of speed, accuracy and rigidity. He said they use their own stepper drives instead of Geckos because the Geckos just weren’t consistent enough. Tool changers are not on the menu at the moment, so if you have a shop, and you need to churn out parts, get a Haas. But, if you want a nice-looking enclosed machine that can do some fairly serious cutting, and will easily fit in your garage, this looks like a pretty good thing. I’m seriously considering getting one, but first I have to make room in my garage for it.
Incidentally, I asked Phil how they got into this. It’s the old story. They needed to do a bunch of machining, and a machine shop quote brought them up short. They looked around for some kind of CNC machine to get, and eventually got a small one that proved totally inadequate. At some point, somebody said “Hey! We can do way better than that!” Now they have a couple of facilities in China. The assembly building in Watsonville is not in an industrial park, it’s on a kind of back road, but inside it are three or four machines being assembled, all spoken for, I gathered. Phil said waiting time on orders right now is about four weeks. I asked him how many machines they have sold, and he said “I can’t tell you that.” Can’t, or won’t? He also does not offer referrals, saying “We don’t ask our customers to sell our machines for us.” An understandable attitude, considering that they would have no control over what the customer said or did, but it seems that sales will be slower until enough of these machines get out into the world so that you don’t have to go to Watsonville to see one.