buying cnc machine from China? read this first

[Forrera]

buying a cnc machine from China is very tempting because they're cheap, so I bought one. 40" by 24" 4 axis engraver through ebay which looked very nice in the picture.
it arrived to London with little damage but nothing drastic.
believe it or not, this machine was NOT made with a cnc machine!!!
very crude cut and shaped with a file aluminium parts and spindle mount. nevertheless,  I said non of these would stop me using the machine.
electric wires very poorly insulated, some not insulated at all, passing through tiny holes in driver stainless inclosure without grommet or conduit. here I had to stop, made the holes bigger, and insultated the wires with conduit to prevent imminent electricution.
only 2 of the axis worked, out of 4, and spindle never worked. this is not the end of the world, every thing can be fixed.
z axis went haywire while testing and broke the coulpling, luckily it was cheap to fix. now it developed a nasty growling sound.
last but not least, the drivers inclosure almost cought fire today. but honestly, the smoke it made was probably worse than fire. NOW I HAD TO STOP.
I don't know what went wrong.
very poor instructions, only pictures on a cd to show how to set it up.
I think it was a total waste of money.

[Hood]

Well if its any consolation my first go at CNC was almost as bad, crap drives and breakout from USA  eBay and no support from the guy that made them almost made me give up. Luckily I got some help from John Prentice and in the end I decided to just get new drives and bob and move on.
Hopefully its not put you off CNC and you will bounce back

Hood

[Forrera]

not at all, I got another one already from Taiwan, baby one, and I can see the difference in quality already.
I intend to replace the drivers with better ones.
any help is greatly appreciated
btw, who's John Prentice?

[Hood]

John Prentice is a great guy from Nottingham. He was active on the Yahoo group when I started, think he does a fair amount of the VB side of things for Tormach, or at least he did.
When I started there was no forum and Benny mentioned about starting one, quite a few on the Yahoo group were very vocal against the forum saying it wasnt needed and was a waste of time, well Benny decided to prove them wrong and I think he has done that, I much prefer it to the Yahoo format, good on you Benny (ynneb as he was then and Pythagoras now)

If you want my opinion on stepper drives then I would say Geckos are the leaders withthe chinese Leadshine type coming a close second. I have both Geckos and the Leadshine type that Arceuro in the UK sell and they are fine but still think the Geckos edge them.

Hood