After thorough reading on this forum and many others, and many backwards and forwards emails between Nolan and myself, I took the plunge and sent Thunder Laser my deposit on a Mars 130 with a 100W laser tube, HR head, 4" head and rotation attachment. The massive box arrived a couple of months later, customs and clearance was no trouble and thanks to new Australian tax laws I can write off the full depreciation of the machine in the first year of use!

The unpacking and installation process took much longer than I expected. A lack of clear English instructions made the process quite slow, although perhaps the most difficult process was connecting the machine to our workshop mac computer. Our virtual windows machine is running at 64 bit, however the standard Thunder Laser windows plugin is designed for 32 bit machines. With some serious perseverance we ended up successfully connecting the machine using the 64 bit plugin available on the thunder laser site. There was no clear instruction on how to solve this problem as the installer was giving us error messages in Chinese. Nolan was always on call and helped solve any queries or problems within a few hours.

After setting up the machine the possibilities are still revealing themselves to us. It's a great workhorse, reliable and great fun to use when we have time to experiment with it. The RDWorks software is very difficult to comprehend, and often requires trial and error to work out what different settings will do despite the "instructions" which have been written in very rough english. Once the software has been learnt however, it is very useful and reliable.

Overall the experience has been great, however I'd warn any non-technical users to persevere with setup and learning and probably have a tech savvy friend on hand to help out. Thanks Nolan for all your help with the purchasing process, I wouldn't feel confident purchasing without your ongoing support and advice.