Hi All,
This is just a quick warning for newbies who might be considering purchase of a Practical CNC. In a word, "Don't."
I made the mistake of buying one and in five months it never worked right. I spent hundreds of dollars shipping parts to Practical for repair/replacement. I had a controller burn out, three motor failures, and four driver failures and a bent X axis shaft. Their expensive torch control system never did work right and slammed my new torch through a sheet of steel doing considerable damage.
I replaced the Practical CNC torch height control system (which didn't work) with the MP-1000 THC system from CandCNC (which works great). Practical CNC then used that as an excuse for denying warranty service on the controller. Please note that the controller and torch height control are separate things.
Anyway, in desperation, I finally bought a prototype controller from Tom Caudle at CandCNC. Now everthing is working great. Tom gives fantastic service and his advice is a tremendous help. Need help? Ask Tom on this site or on the CandCNC Yahoo group.
I use Corel Draw and ProgeCAD Lt (ProgeCAD Lt is free) for my design work, SheetCAM for layout and to generate GCode, Mach3 as the controller software, PSC-650 power supply and controller, and the MP-1000 THC system. Now I have a system that works pretty damned well. And Tom has become a friend. I wish that all businesses were run by his principles.
I hope this helps some people to avoid the mistakes I made by choosing Practical CNC.
Paul "Graybeard" Paine