[peterpan84]

Been doing a bit of research over the last couple months on CNC and from what I read, the X3 is a good choice for a high quality machine on a budget. I am trying not to spend more than $2000 but can probably spend a bit more if I have to.

I am looking for one of the following:

1. A turnkey solution that includes the Seig X3 and CNC conversion preinstalled and ready to connect to my parallel port and Mach3.

2. A full Seig X3 3 or 4 axis conversion kit that includes the motors, drivers etc, pretty much the same thing as above but I would put it together myself. If I go this route, I prefer the kit to be one that I do not have to modify anything on the X3 (ie use the original holes).

I understand converting the CNC myself is a better learning experience but I already built a cupcake CNC before so understand a bit of the concept plus I usually mickey mouse things and would like some piece of mind that a professional put everything together.

I am also prepared to buy a used machine if any of you are selling at a reasonable price.

For the kit, I didn't see CNCkits.com.au mentioned in the similar thread started by Scuba Steve. Is anyone using their kit? Any comments?

Also, if I want to add a 4th access later, does it matter what conversion kit I purchased initially?

Lastly, is this machine fast enough for production? For example, how long would you estimate the machine would take (on its best setup) to turn a 6" x 6" block of 6061 aluminum into a 1" x 1" block.

Hope to hear some input.

[peterpan84]

I will probably go with the X3 over the SX3. Don't need too much for my first machine as long as it can cut aluminum with no problems

[WOTDesigns]

the new "best of the breed" is the 704 and that really is the best way to go imo. HOSS support puts it over the top, but it really is a better designed platform.

someone recently offered me $3500 for my X3 and I just laughed at him. thats less than it will cost me to build another one if I count hundreds of hours of work as a complete write off.

check out crevicereamer.com for an idea of pricing, or read through a few of the many recent threads comparing the two different mills and it should be fairly easy: 704 is a better machine. x3 is a little more "kit" friendly and very tried and true.

from your question about how fast it can turn a 6" square into a 1" square I'm guessing you will need to go through the same slow and expensive learning process the rest of us did. it takes a LOT more to learn to cut than it does to make the machine. you can go pretty cheap on cam (cambam or similar) and others can give cad ideas, but "decent" software gets expensive and the learning curve is pretty massive.

a bandsaw would be a lot faster at turning a 6"into a 1". check my you tube for x3 cutting. bunch more videos coming soon too. just search for my user name.

[peterpan84]

What is the 704? Is there a website link? For hoss, are your referring to hossmachine.info?

I have already started reading crevicereamer.com (great website)

As far as cutting a 6 x 6 block down to 1 x 1, I am not attempting to do this, I just wanted to get a general idea of the speed of the X3, providing it is setup the best way possible, how long would it take to cut it down? Just looking for an estimate so I have an idea.

[peterpan84]

Another question, I read that the grizzly x3 is identical to the seig x3 but some other sites contradict that saying that Seig has a lot of complaints and grizzly is a good choice. Are they the same machine, just re branded by Grizzly or does grizzly customize it a little bit.

[peterpan84]

I have recently discovered the KX3 and KX1, would these be a better option for a turn around solution?

[WOTDesigns]

little machine shop sells the only KX1 I'm aware of for $4200 here. IMO its way too much $ for its size but if it is true to its specs its more accurate than most conversions. A few months ago when I was in their shop they had a KX3 demo they might be willing to sell, but you will have to call and ask. great company to deal with.

the "X" mills are all made by Sieg. X1, X2, X3, KX3, C4, C6 etc are THEIR part numbers. companies like Harbor Freight and Grizzly buy them in quantity and import them. The belief is that grizzly parts for the "better" ones and send back ones that are obviously bad. IDK exactly how true this is.

your best bet really is to buya G0704, buy the Hoss conversion plans and convert. it will cost a LOT less than any other option of the same quality ... this is coming from a happy X3CNC owner. if I were starting over I would go with the 704.

OR if your actually serious about light production just bite the bullet now and get a Tormach PCNC770 and you won't end up having to buy one later. thats where,i am now. making money on my little cnc, but need bigger and faster with less maintenance

[peterpan84]

My guess is that grizzly imports the KX3 with just a different color and slight appearance mods so it looks like their own product and when people put 1+1 together they just made random excuses to differentiate the product. In my opinion, companies like Grizzly don't like letting people know their suppliers.

I think a user here already bought there KX3 demo, I remember reading a thread about the guy needing help with drivers. I am actually in Indonesia for about a year so might be more practical to get it from China direct.

Converting an X3 was the choice at first but then I heard that it could take 6 months to a year, 100+ hours, hair pulling, etc., which is time I rather spend on other things as I already read a book on building it and built a cupcake cnc so know a bit about the concept.

I guess now its between the KX1 and KX3. I am thinking KX1 would be a first good machine and if I actually do turn this into making prototypes or production, I would eventually need a better machine anyways and can use both. I am just worried that the KX1 might not cut as good as the KX3, I would mainly be cutting aluminum but might experiment with steel.

Is the tormach machine made in the USA? A bit over my budget but will keep an eye on it.

Also, it may seem like a newbie question but if the X axis for example has maximum travel of 10", does that mean 10" from the center so it can realistically go about 20" (10 in each direction) or is it 10" total (5" in each direction from center).

[WOTDesigns]

travels are expressed in maximum travel that the machine can achieve. subtract the diameter of the tool for side milling, and assuming your work is perfectly centered, and you have your maximum work piece size. so 10" X travel minus 1.5" fly cutter = 8.5" maximum work piece in a perfect world. KX1 is also not r8 spindle so you have to buy tool holders for the MT3 spindle IIRC.

I don't believe grizzly has ever sold the KX3, but I could be wrong. If you can get it strait from Sieg then you can get what ever you want. Not many of us state side are willing to go through the hassle of importing strait from china, but if its easier where you are it will likely be cheaper that way.

Tormach is made in china, or at least most of the components are, but I consider it to be American quality as they are an american company with amazing service, dedication, and quality assurance. the true chinese machines are made and shipped, the tormach machines are actually tested and measured

[TaK]

If cost is your main consideration (and $2k is quite low) then you basically have to go with a conversion yourself. Keep in mind also that tooling is expensive. At minimum you will need: some end mills, a milling vice, an edge finder, a dial indicator, and some parallels. Then you also have to buy software as Priddy pointed out. Even the cheapest CAD and CAM software is hundreds of dollars.

6 months to CNC an X3 mill is way too long if you are actively working on it. Cleaning the new mill will take a day or so of work and you will probably need a friend to help move it. If you get a 'bolt on kit' like a CNC Fusion kit, and you have all the pieces you need (mill, kit, electronics, and computer), it should only take an afternoon to put it all together. After that it will take at least another afternoon to get it setup and moving properly. At this stage you will have a working CNC mill, but you are still miles away from producing good parts. It takes a lot of time to get good at working your mill and finding and fixing problems.

You can call harbor freight about a KX3. I believe they sold is as item #66051. I know they still sell replacement parts for it; I have one on order now.

TK

[peterpan84]

travels are expressed in maximum travel that the machine can achieve. subtract the diameter of the tool for side milling, and assuming your work is perfectly centered, and you have your maximum work piece size. so 10" X travel minus 1.5" fly cutter = 8.5" maximum work piece in a perfect world. KX1 is also not r8 spindle so you have to buy tool holders for the MT3 spindle IIRC.

I don't believe grizzly has ever sold the KX3, but I could be wrong. If you can get it strait from Sieg then you can get what ever you want. Not many of us state side are willing to go through the hassle of importing strait from china, but if its easier where you are it will likely be cheaper that way.

Tormach is made in china, or at least most of the components are, but I consider it to be American quality as they are an american company with amazing service, dedication, and quality assurance. the true chinese machines are made and shipped, the tormach machines are actually tested and measured

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I purchase 40 foot containers from China all the time so getting it there is not an issue. Tormach looks good, will consider them for my second machine

If cost is your main consideration (and $2k is quite low) then you basically have to go with a conversion yourself. Keep in mind also that tooling is expensive. At minimum you will need: some end mills, a milling vice, an edge finder, a dial indicator, and some parallels. Then you also have to buy software as Priddy pointed out. Even the cheapest CAD and CAM software is hundreds of dollars.

6 months to CNC an X3 mill is way too long if you are actively working on it. Cleaning the new mill will take a day or so of work and you will probably need a friend to help move it. If you get a 'bolt on kit' like a CNC Fusion kit, and you have all the pieces you need (mill, kit, electronics, and computer), it should only take an afternoon to put it all together. After that it will take at least another afternoon to get it setup and moving properly. At this stage you will have a working CNC mill, but you are still miles away from producing good parts. It takes a lot of time to get good at working your mill and finding and fixing problems.

You can call harbor freight about a KX3. I believe they sold is as item #66051. I know they still sell replacement parts for it; I have one on order now.

TK

I have actually increased my budget, I might now be able to spend up to $5k. I thought the conversion would take only a couple days as well if I had the kit but other threads about 6 months or a year kinda scared me, maybe they were doing additional upgrades. The only thing is I usually do things micky mouse with putting stuff together and it is good peice of mind knowing that the machine was put together by a pro and not a mouse. HF used to sell the KX3 but now the page redirects to another product so I guess they stopped selling it.

I think the only situation I am in right now is choosing between the Seig KX3 or the Hau Mau HM-135 which appears to be the same but I am unsure if there is a quality difference. Home Page says that the Seig is a reputable machine but I read a thread here about the Seig having complaints so the info is contradicting itself.

[WOTDesigns]

many people have said it: "if you want a hobby build a cnc; if you want to make parts- buy a cnc".

I look at my x3 as a practice cnc. I've crashed and learned, the table has a few beauty marks, I've blown a controller, blown fuses, seized the spindle bearings because I had to tight of a clamp, and have learned a LOT of things not to do. had I done this to a $15K machine there would be several wrench impressions in my walls. Best part is that I will eventually have a second ops machine for dedicated set ups like squaring stock while the big one is running, engraving, etc.

if I could hasn't gotten a KX3 for $5K I would have. This has been an amazing year of learning and I wouldn't trade building mine for ease of use now. there isn't much real support on these machines so knowing how they work is pretty vital and that in itself justifies building vs buying- BECAUSE I knew NOTHING about cnc.

in hind sight - the cnc conversion was the easiest part of the learning process. learning to actually cut metal is much harder. learning CAD was harder still. learning cam even more so. learning what tools to buy, use, and such is right up there too. if I paid myself $3 an hour for the time I have spent reading, researching and learning I would just pay cash for a new HAAS.

It has also become obvious that this process will not end until I do. every day I learn more and my mistakes- though seemingly no less frequent- become less painful. laying in bed or driving will inspire a thought on how to fixture something or how to design something, or a new product idea all together. 16 months ago those thoughts were spent on what to spend money on for my motorcycle or some other arbitrary waste of energy. heck- I used to spend hours a day reading,"Texts From Last Night" and facebook.

Plan on a long road of learning, but understand that if your aren't a machinist already, there is a LOT to learn befor anything becomes profitable our efficient. I started making parts manually. some of the parts would take an hour of cutting for a $10 part to compete with a cnc shop price. dumb? nope. paid learning experience. after converting I've made about another 150 of those same parts. at $10 each still. That alone paid for half of the conversion.

my total conversion was about 6 weeks IIRC. a week or more was stripping, priming and painting plus all of the extra disassembly and reassembly requireed just for that. another 2 weeks was because I was an idiot and fried my controller. another week was wasted jacking around with a bad power supply. another week was just taking pictures and documenting my build. I could build a whole new one this weekend if I had all the parts and that includes cleaning a new mill, but I only have that ability and knowledge because I built my own.

its a trade off. time and learning your machine, vs money and ready to run. my only reservation with the KX3 is that if its made by the same guys that put my X3 together I'll bet my mill that it won't hold the tolerances mine will. I just can't imagine that they completely change their lack of QA, cheapest components available, and half A$$ craftsmanship just because they throw a "K" in front of the Machine Name.

The X3 is "reputable" ONLY because of the low price point. You get a great manual mill after a little work and it makes a great platform for building off of. personally- knowing what I know now- I wouldn't buy a KX3 unless it was less than $3500. Considering the KX1 is only ~35% less than a tormach 770 I'm guessing MY cost on a KX3 would be WAY to close. if your price is significantly cheaper (maybe 50% of the cost of a pcnc 770) then I would say go for the KX3. if not, I would say build if you want to spend less our go for a machine that will actually work out of the box if you want to spend more.

JT CUSTOMS already mentioned it but I will second that even cheap tools and software are going to wind up being several grand pretty fast. I currently have ~$4K into my machine and AT LEAST that in tooling, measuring, and the other things needed to actually make parts.

sorry for rambling. guess not having time to post over the holidays (and too much coffee) is to blame

[WOTDesigns]

forgot to say- reread those 6 month build threads and look at the dates. most have a month between posts reporting a day worth of progress because they had other priorities, lack of funds, health problems, our didn't have the knowledge base available to them that is currently here, our the kits that are now available. took edison 1600 attempts to get the first production filament for his light bulb... takes me seconds to instal it because others paved the way.

[peterpan84]

Great review! No problem about ranting on holidays, I think the holidays is the best time for me to invest more time in this hobby

Everyone seems to mention cleaning the X3, is this really nescessary for performance or is it just a cosmetic thing? If I skip the cosmetics, have all the parts ready (gecko 540, power supply, cnc fusion deluxe kit, wires, etc) can this project be done over the weekend? Is there a lot of room for error when putting on the CNCfusion kit?

As far as software goes, Mach3 software is $150 and I can use a free CAM program or buy one at the same price ($150). I know google sketchup is good enough to make the parts I want to build at first and tried Autocad the other day and it seems to be a similar concept. Going to try Solidworks as well. Should I be investing a lot of my time in google sketchup or do I really need to learn a more advanced CAD program in order to make good parts?

Does the CNC fusion kit come with all the configuration settings for Mach3? If not, is there a website or forum post out there that tells me how to set up Mach3 for use with the converted X or SX3?

The KX3 will likely cost me just about $4000 with a stand. Probably won't invest in a coolant system until I know I need it and can built an enclosure so coolant doesn't fly into my apartments white walls

What would make the CNCFusion converted X3 better quality than the KX3? I would assume the main thing would be high quality ball screws, anything else? This is becoming a very tough decision and I have narrowed it down to just a couple options now so I appreciate all the help.

[TaK]

The cleaning we are referring to is the packing grease that the mill is covered with for shipping. All the exposed surfaces are covered with this thick, sticky grease to prevent them rusting during transport. You do need to clean it off any new mill. It just takes some time, a bunch of rags, and about 0.25gal of WD40.

You can definitely do all the labor in an X3 conversion in a weekend if you already have all the parts. I would give you about a 10% chance of getting everything on hand to build everything in a weekend and get cutting. Expect you will forget something and have to place another order or two.

Please do not expect to be cutting quality pieces very quickly. The hardware setup is the lesser part of the time commitment. You need to learn your software and how it interacts with your hardware. After that, it will still take many pieces before you are cutting things well. I think it was about 2 months before I was cutting things I was proud of.

The software setup is mostly setting up Mach3 to run with the G540 and only uses some easy constants from the CNC Fusion kit. The G540 webpage has a setup file for Mach3.

Sketchup is not an engineering program and not really suited for making designs for machining in my opinion. That said, I know some people use it for that purpose. Solidworks and Autocad are in a different league. You might look at Alibre software as a middle ground. I think it is $100 and it looked good, but I haven't used it. There is a forum in CNCZone for it though.

I don't know enough about the KX3 for a good compare, but there are a lot of converted X3's out there, so you'd be in good company. I haven't read about anyone using a KX3 on this forum in my travels here.

TK

[peterpan84]

Ok, that explains it about the cleaning. Would it hurt to keep the grease on? Maybe it will protect it against future rust?

I have started playing around with CAM software today, I was able to get a hold of MasterCam, Cut3D by Vectric, and Bobcad. MasterCam seems extremely confusing, I think I am going to stay away from it until I need to produce weird parts. The parts I intend to create right now are really simple. Like a square with some holes in it. I designed it in sketchup which can be converted into Autocad, STL, etc. I played with the Cut3D demo and it seems to be extremely simple so might start off with that. I have also been running some samples in Mach3 without any CNC machine connected to try to learn a bit more. Haven't tried bobcad yet but going to try it now. I appreciate the help!

[ImagineRobots]

.....
The KX3 will likely cost me just about $4000 with a stand. Probably won't invest in a coolant system until I know I need it and can built an enclosure so coolant doesn't fly into my apartments white walls

What would make the CNCFusion converted X3 better quality than the KX3? I would assume the main thing would be high quality ball screws, anything else? This is becoming a very tough decision and I have narrowed it down to just a couple options now so I appreciate all the help.

These mills are heavy! Make sure you can get it into your apartment. It's not uncommon to use an engine or chain hoist to move these things.

I recommend you buy a turnkey solution so you can focus on making parts. You might also want to consider the Syil machines even though there have been some quality issues in the past. The folks at Probotix seem to be happy with their Syil and plan to carry it. Tormach is the safe bet but it comes at a higher price point. There's also a Taig CNC that is much smaller but also a lot easier to move around. I don't recommend getting a Sherline conversion because the lead screws and nuts are way too small on the mill compared to the Taig.

I just spent all of December converting an X3 to CNC. Things can easily spiral out of control during a build. A turnkey solution takes care of many of these details. ie: one shot lubrication system for the ways and ball nuts, bellow covers for keeping out swarf, covers for the stepper motors, limit switches, wiring from the steppers to the controllers, spindle control interface, power supply setup, etc. These details can kill a lot of time on a scratch build even with a "bolt on" kit from CNC Fusion. Taking apart the mill isn't always easy especially when some of the bearings in the Z axis are almost pressed fit on (in my case). There's also risk involved with a scratch build like frying your electronics due to bad wiring, damaging a part on the mill during the tear down, etc. You just have to be prepared for things like this and better make sure you are committed once you start.

I did learn a lot with the conversion but I'm not sure it was worth any cost savings over a turnkey solution.

Attached is a pic of my progress. Almost done with the one shot oiler system (what a pain!). Should be enough to scare you into getting a turnkey ;-)

[peterpan84]

So the HM-135 is a no go since locally they are asking about $7000 which is a big no no. The only reason I wanted it was because I can grab it today but not paying $7000 for a $4000 machine. The KX3 was my next choice but they haven't replied to my last email yet so I contacted Syil and worked out a deal on the X4 machine with some accessories. They said it can ship within 10 days so am going to wire them the money tomorrow unless someone here disagrees. Thank you to everyone for your help!

[peterpan84]

Do you guys think I should get the 220V version or the 110V one? I will be moving it to the US within a year but right now am in Indonesia which uses 220V. I just read something about overheating problems with 220V. If I get a 110V version and a $100 voltage converter, should I be okay?

[ImagineRobots]

Do you guys think I should get the 220V version or the 110V one? I will be moving it to the US within a year but right now am in Indonesia which uses 220V. I just read something about overheating problems with 220V. If I get a 110V version and a $100 voltage converter, should I be okay?

Seems like you should go with the 120VAC if you will be moving to the US. You won't find 240VAC in most US apartments (unless you hijack a dryer outlet).

I don't have first hand experience using a 240VAC to 120VAC converter but you'll want to do a lot of research to make sure the converter can handle the motor startup currents. Pretty sure you want one that is transformer based and I believe those things can be very heavy (cost?) Stay away from the electronics based converters since I don't think most are design to handle motors.

Also, I believe in general the line frequency at 240VAC is 50hz. In the US, the line frequency is 60 hz. Make sure the 120VAC Syil which would typically run at 60hz is ok at 50 hz. I would ask Syil about the inverter question and the line frequency. Hopefully they won't say it voids the warranty.