Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
Only tangentially related to this thread, but I've been eyeing the chinese line of 3040 (and larger) routers for a while.
Their quality is all over the place, but some vendors like www.omiocnc.com put together some very nice packages (with HG20 rails versus round rails) at a price that's very affordable for FRC teams.
I've been tempted to buy one for myself and/or 973, but we already have too many machines.
For a team w/o a router and a limited budget, their performance blows away shapeko or X-carves for sure. Not even comparable. You're able to cut aluminum with these at a rate that is fast enough for FRC production (our router was limping this season, and was barely able to cut faster than these machines can and we still made a boatload of parts). |
Interesting. I'd heard a bunch of mixed reviews on the 3040 style machines over the last couple years and most of that came from the lackluster electronics driving them. [1] Most folks I've seen tended to swap out the entire brains, these seem to come with at least more than "requires a parallel port".
If you decide to pull the trigger I hope to see a good review. If not, maybe I con convince a local hackerspace that $1000 is not a terrible idea to get a piece of smaller equipment.
[1] This seems to be the vibe I get on a lot of the lower end stuff is the electronics are a essentially Woot BoC levels, sometimes great sometimes they explode when power is applied.