Cheapo CNC Router/laser

[Hitch]

I quite fancy having a little CNC router, and laser engraver, primarily for hobby woodworking.
I quite fancy an Ooznest, but as its only for messing about, I can't justify the price tag.


Theres loads of buget models on the likes of Amazon around the £2-300 with reasonable reviews.
Has anyone here got any real experience with one of these small low budget machines?

 

[Newlands]

I nearly went for an Ooznest last year but was put off by the lack of rigidity reported in many of the forums. I’m sure they work fine for non-critical stuff, and if you’re not too ambitious with depth of cut and feed rate. I ended up buying a base machine from Czechia, and then fitting it out with all the steppers and control gear, which was actually a lot more expensive in the end, but is big enough to do, say, kitchen cabinets etc.
The smaller machines on eBay are ok for what they are, but expect to have to upgrade many of the components as you discover the limitations - for a start the gantry is usually too flimsy to support a proper spindle, and you might end up with a pirated copy of Mach3 to run it (a friend of mine had this on his eBay purchase, and the vendor was persuaded to supply a proper copy!). He has successfully produced the usual coasters, place mats, house names etc, as well as some engraving, electrical panels and circuit boards. He has the advantage of owning a company which has some full size cnc machines, access to SolidWorks and a background in programming etc so he hit the ground running compared with me - I found it pretty hard work to get my head round Mach4 and setting up the controller software (but interesting in a geeky way, and satisfying when it actually works!).

 

[Fraserb]

I quite fancy having a little CNC router, and laser engraver, primarily for hobby woodworking.
I quite fancy an Ooznest, but as its only for messing about, I can't justify the price tag.


Theres loads of buget models on the likes of Amazon around the £2-300 with reasonable reviews.
Has anyone here got any real experience with one of these small low budget machines?

I've got an amazon one, can get the make of it later, it works well enough but had issues with the gcode side of it, now I've the cnc plasma I don't use it.

It's similar to this one.

CNC 3018 Max Engraving Machine, Mini 3 Axis CNC Router Machine GRBL Control Wood Plastic PCB Milling Machine with Offline Controller. : Amazon.co.uk: DIY & Tools

Shop CNC 3018 Max Engraving Machine, Mini 3 Axis CNC Router Machine GRBL Control Wood Plastic PCB Milling Machine with Offline Controller.. Free delivery on eligible orders of £20 or more.

www.amazon.co.uk

You can have it for the cost of Postage, as just gathering dust here.

 

[Newlands]

You can have it for the cost of Postage, as just gathering dust here.

There’s an offer you can’t refuse @Hitch

 

[Hitch]

When you say issues with the gcode side of things, was that the machine interpreting the gcode wrongly?
Did you get it working sucessfully, or was it always a pain? When it works, whats the smoothness like, ie does it do reasonably good smooth curves etc?



I can do a bit of modelling/play with a bit of gcode manually and ran CNC machines before.

PM incoming

 

[Fraserb]

It worked fine and made nice smooth curves and such, some times you could draw out a shape, convert it to gcode and it would route it out perfectly, next shape you drew out it would cut a mirror image instead.

The software that came with it was pretty basic, now that I know more about cnc stuff with the plasma I don't think any of the issues would be too bad to fix but the plasma has taken over my spare time.

 

[pcwizme]

In my opinion I would say get either a CNC router or a laser, not one that does both as they generally arnt ideal to do both things. Lasers generally want to be moving fast and have little torque needed, Routers want to move slower and need lots of torque. If you want a cheapish laser then the Ortur laser is fairly good, and can use light burn (agreed to be basically one of the best laser software possible (well at least by those in the facebook laser groups I am in))