A few months ago I bought a Camaster Cobra 510 ATC with a "two-year warranty" for $50,270.00. And while I had heard good things about them in the past, I have to say I have been surprised by the generally terrible customer service and poor product performance. Quite honestly, I feel like I threw away FIFTY GRAND.
To start off with, when I was ordering my machine, I requested an add-on and was told it was $500. While that wasn't cheap, I decided to order it and was promptly told "Oh, sorry. It's $700 now." When I said, "I was quoted $500 by one of the owners. Can't you honor his pricing?" I was told "No, it's $700". While that was a small thing, my experience with them hasn't got any better...
Not long after I got my small business up and running, my machine started locking up and generally having a mind of it's own. It would refuse to cut, then it would cut a sheet or two, and then skip a few commands and go on to random movements so as to completely destroy the sheet I was trying to cut. At $277.76 per sheet, this very quickly became an expensive problem. One of my biggest problems with Camaster is half the time, you can't get someone on the phone there. They have 2 or 3 tech guys and they are constantly "in a meeting", "training" or "traveling". And if you have a problem during any of these times, you are basically SCREWED. After a full week of going back and forth with the tech department (when I could even get someone on the phone), the only answer I was getting was "Gee, that's weird". Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence does it? I had personally made commitments to cut several projects and lost about $1,500 a day while I was down, not to mention looking like a complete joke to my customers thanks to Camaster.
When I finally convinced Camaster that I needed a replacement motherboard, I was told that it would take another 4-5 days to ship it to me. They could overnight it, but it would COST EXTRA. WTF? I'm out $50k, my business is put on hold, I can't fulfill my commitments while the machine is down and you won't even comp the shipping? On top of that, replacing the motherboard is not for the faint of heart. Attachment 222028 There are about a THOUSAND color coated wires going all over the place and the instructions I got from them were "Just unplug the wires from the old one and hook up the replacement". ??? Not much to go on is it? Since their factory is only about 4 hrs away from me, I thought they would send someone out to fix it, but NOPE... I'm on my own.
Now, it's less than 60 days since the last repairs, the machine will not cut ANYTHING AT ALL due to a bad Y1 drive. Again, my business is put on hold until someone finds the time to ship me the part to repair this big piece of junk. Time is money to anyone who forks out this kind of dough on a machine, but Camaster fails to realize this and fails their customers. I wish I had gone with a more reputable company, even if I had to pay a little more for it. If you are considering buying a Camaster, look elsewhere and CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED...