[gday01]

I just learned that the vendor that would not accept a return of the G203V that powered up with a Red LED no longer sells Gecko drives, they have their own line now. I find that interesting!!

[New2CNCPaul]

I'm just a bit shocked that the "unkillable drive" is quite killable.

I'm not sure why they even allow others to sell the product if warranty issues will be handled like this.

Makes me a tad uneasy that I purchased my last 5 out of 9 from another supplier. But it was done to ease shipping and duty into Canada!

Hope Gday & Gecko can come to a reasonable agreement to both sides.



Paul

[gday01]

I hope I did not get the returns from someone else to torture me for 2 weeks! If they are dropping the Gecko line. I would hate to think that would happen. I was offered no support though.

[CoAMarcus]

The company you purchased those from now sells Chinese motor controls manufactured by a company that has previously admitted to pirating our drives in the past. That is a subject for another day.

I have yet to hear what you would like us to do. How would you like us to have handled this situation? All I have heard so far is that you are displeased but no suggestion for how things should have been handled. After looking at our records it appears we have replaced drives for you free of charge in the past under our "one time, stuff happens" policy.

Regarding the "unkillable" drives being killable: That is true. Pouring water or another conductive material such as metal chips on powered electronics will result in damage, regardless of manufacturer.

We do not use domestic distributors but will be setting up international distributors beginning on the first of the year. What resellers of our drives do is nothing we can control; all we can control is what ships out of our doors and we only see what comes back to us.

Marcus Freimanis

[gday01]

I want to be comfortable ordering your products again. I admit I wired 2 of the drives wrong even though that is not supposed to kill them I will accept responsibility. If you replaced 2 of the drives with new I will be able to cut the expense of 8 drives. I just thought it the Gecko Way.

[CastCNC]

Regarding the "unkillable" drives being killable: That is true. Pouring water or another conductive material such as metal chips on powered electronics will result in damage, regardless of manufacturer.

Somehow I just cannot see gday having done anything like this.

I can completely understand reluctance to warrant an item that has obviously been abused as described above but my understanding is 2 of the drives were not even opened by the customer and 1 was in fault condition from the first time he tried to use it.

Looks like he has been caught on the cusp of a vendor whose morals may be in question if you are saying they are selling products of a company who produced unauthorized knockoffs and they are dropping the gecko line so they dont want to help him and the best he got from gecko was an offer to bury his $600 investment for him. How did metal get inside of the drive if he did not open them? Is it possible that he was not the first person to have bought them?

It appears that the best way to avoid problems that could arise in dealing with a third party vendor is to only buy the drives directly from gecko.

Harry

[gday01]

I have yet to hear what you would like us to do. How would you like us to have handled this situation? All I have heard so far is that you are displeased but no suggestion for how things should have been handled. After looking at our records it appears we have replaced drives for you free of charge in the past under our "one time, stuff

I know this is in refrence to the G540 I shorted trying to hit that hidden trim pot. that has only happened to me! I then plugged in a suspect motor because the G540 was trashed and the vendor thought I was nuts for thinking the motor was bad, that smoked another axis port. I paid you for one drive and you repaired one under warranty.

The more I readi think about you bringing up unrelated events and that email I received the more depressed I get.

[Ron Dunn]

There's a whiff of blackmail in the air.

It looks like someone sold you used or damaged goods. Isn't your complaint truly with the seller, not the manufacturer?

Who is the seller from whom you bought the goods? What is the law relating to the sale of faulty goods in their location? If I were in your position I'd be pursuing the seller for a refund, then using the refund to buy a replacement from a more reputable supplier (ie, Gecko directly).

And I have to say it, you do seem a little accident prone. Perhaps you should also sit back for a while and think about whether making/wiring a CNC machine is something you're capable of doing. An assembled and tested machine might be a better purchase for you.

[CastCNC]

Hehe... methinks most people would be quite envious of gdays machine Ron, I know I am. Having seen photos of his shop and so knowing it is immaculate and well equipped which to me would be a good first indication that his care and abilities are first rate... very intuitive of you to be able to make such assumptions though.

Harry

[TOTALLYRC]

It is very easy to get metal shaving swarf chips and all sorts of stuff into a drive.
I did it to one of mine. The easiest way is to trim a wire conductor and let the small piece of wire just fly. With the stranded wire that we use one of thos strand is very small and can get into everything.

I did mine while wiring the drives in horizontal position. Evey time I trimmed or stripped a wire some of the debris fell into the box.

Learned my lesson the hard way.

You can also get metal shaving in there when drilling a mounting hole. I leaned that if you have to drill inside the box after any component is inside of it you must use a vacuum to catch all the chips while you are drilling.
Some of the chips still get away from the vac as difficult as that may be to believe it can happen.

The unkillable drive comes from the electronic protection against overload and wiring errors. I can't imagine a way to protect the drive from swarf getting inside the case and shorting components on the circuit board.

Mike

[gday01]

There's a whiff of blackmail in the air.

It looks like someone sold you used or damaged goods. Isn't your complaint truly with the seller, not the manufacturer?

Who is the seller from whom you bought the goods? What is the law relating to the sale of faulty goods in their location? If I were in your position I'd be pursuing the seller for a refund, then using the refund to buy a replacement from a more reputable supplier (ie, Gecko directly).

And I have to say it, you do seem a little accident prone. Perhaps you should also sit back for a while and think about whether making/wiring a CNC machine is something you're capable of doing. An assembled and tested machine might be a better purchase for you.

I will not name the Vendor, if you lived in this country you would understand why. I can surely see your doubts about my qualifications viewed thru this tiny snippet of my life. Thanks for your view point.

[gday01]

It is very easy to get metal shaving swarf chips and all sorts of stuff into a drive.
I did it to one of mine. The easiest way is to trim a wire conductor and let the small piece of wire just fly. With the stranded wire that we use one of thos strand is very small and can get into everything.

I did mine while wiring the drives in horizontal position. Evey time I trimmed or stripped a wire some of the debris fell into the box.

Learned my lesson the hard way.

You can also get metal shaving in there when drilling a mounting hole. I leaned that if you have to drill inside the box after any component is inside of it you must use a vacuum to catch all the chips while you are drilling.
Some of the chips still get away from the vac as difficult as that may be to believe it can happen.

The unkillable drive comes from the electronic protection against overload and wiring errors. I can't imagine a way to protect the drive from swarf getting inside the case and shorting components on the circuit board.

Mike

Some very good points here. I wonder if a sealed case would make these more Unkillable?

[LeeWay]

Probably not. You still have the terminals that would always be exposed. The difference might be that a stray wire there is protected against.

To me, what is obvious is that neither party is at fault. The third party guy may be at fault, but it may have been an honest mistake as well.
No matter what though, something besides the drives will get burnt.

I have had some trouble in the past, and was always taken care of by Gecko. I have offered to pay sometimes and they would not charge, because the issue was with a part on the board not working correctly.
Never any shorts though. They have always repaired or replaced my drives. A couple times it was clearly my fault as well. I switched the DC side of my PS and the last one in line got shot twice. Both repaired. This was before Gecko manuals warned doing that. I think I am the cause of that clause.
Invent a smarter drive and someone will invent a smarter idiot.

I do feel your pain though. The first drive I ever killed was a Xylotex. It too was repaired for free. Doesn't repair that feeling in the pit of your stomach though.

Perhaps good practice would be to always use a small electronics vacuum or can of air before attempting to energize newly built electronics.
I always use a vacuum followed by air.

[Richards]

It's always hard to be caught in the middle when damage is done to electronics. For thirty years, I designed and installed process control computers for professional photolabs. It didn't take long before I stopped trying to troubleshoot problems over the telephone. Too many customers had 'accidents' with pens dropping out of their pockets or multimeter leads shorting out components or screwdrivers slipping. Those customers where not incompetent; they just lived in a different world where tiny errors didn't break things. In their world, if you shorted out a light socket when installing that socket, a breaker would pop and no damage would be done. In my world, hundreds and even thousands of dollars or damage could occur before a breaker popped because the breaker was sized to protect the customer's building against excess heat caused by excess current on large gauge wiring. In my world of digital electronics, it only took nanoseconds to fry expensive components. In their world of household wiring, it took real effort to damage electronics.

Gecko builds fine products. More than once I've done something stupid while wiring up one of their drives. The drives have always survived. However, no one can build electronics that survive metal filings inside the case. Gecko should not be faulted for building cases that are not air tight and debris tight.

We all know that we need to use industrial quality cases to house our controller electronics. We all know that we need to use paper templates when locating holes. We all know that we don't drill holes in metal when other electronics are mounted nearby.

Even though we 'know' the rules, we sometimes think that breaking the rules 'just one time' is okay. It is not Gecko's fault when we break the rules.

In this case, it appears that the G203v were purchased from an unscrupulous dealer who may have abused those drives or sold drives that had been abused to gday01. That's unfortunate. We all expect honor and honesty when we deal with others; but, being honest also means that we don't blame Gecko for problems unrelated to their design or to their manufacturing process.

[CoAMarcus]

gday,

After reading everything that has been posted it sounds like your drives may have been contaminated with the foreign objects at the reseller end and you were left holding the bag. After seeing the excellent and neat machine builds you have done that CastCNC attested to I believe that the contamination was not due to anything you did.

We are more than happy to replace all four G203Vs and will ship them out tomorrow.

As mentioned previously we only see what comes through the doors here. We manufacture all of our drives in our plant where we do no metal turning so we can ensure that all of our drives ship free of contaminants. If a drive comes back here for evaluation and it has conductive material on the PCB it is generally something that happened in a machining environment. Because you said this is not the case it sounds like you may have gotten the short end of the stick, and we would like to make sure that you are not out the $600 due to a third party's problem.

Marcus

[dsquire]

gday,

After reading everything that has been posted it sounds like your drives may have been contaminated with the foreign objects at the reseller end and you were left holding the bag. After seeing the excellent and neat machine builds you have done that CastCNC attested to I believe that the contamination was not due to anything you did.

We are more than happy to replace all four G203Vs and will ship them out tomorrow.

As mentioned previously we only see what comes through the doors here. We manufacture all of our drives in our plant where we do no metal turning so we can ensure that all of our drives ship free of contaminants. If a drive comes back here for evaluation and it has conductive material on the PCB it is generally something that happened in a machining environment. Because you said this is not the case it sounds like you may have gotten the short end of the stick, and we would like to make sure that you are not out the $600 due to a third party's problem.

Marcus

Forum Members

Several years ago I started following various CNC build threads on this forum and others. After a while it became quite clear to me that when and if I purchased the necessary controllers and drives ect. it would be Gecko.

Why? Because over the last couple of years I have never seen any other company treat their customers the way Marcus does. Their products may cost a bit more than some off the competition but they do work as advertised and if there is a problem they are there when you need them from what I have seen.

If I buy any of these products there is absolutely no question, they will be from Gecko.

Just to keep the record straight, I have no connection with Marcus or Gecko, and have never talked to or exchanged emails. The way I see it, some things just need saying.

Cheers :cheers:

Don

[New2CNCPaul]

Forum Members

Several years ago I started following various CNC build threads on this forum and others. After a while it became quite clear to me that when and if I purchased the necessary controllers and drives ect. it would be Gecko.

Why? Because over the last couple of years I have never seen any other company treat their customers the way Marcus does. Their products may cost a bit more than some off the competition but they do work as advertised and if there is a problem they are there when you need them from what I have seen.

If I buy any of these products there is absolutely no question, they will be from Gecko.

Just to keep the record straight, I have no connection with Marcus or Gecko, and have never talked to or exchanged emails. The way I see it, some things just need saying.

Cheers :cheers:

Don

I'm with you 100% here. Gecko is great, I've yet to have a problem with any of my 9 G203v's and we see that if I did they stand behind their product.

I'll just make sure that my next purchase (g540) will be direct from them....or one of their international distributers....hopefully well get one here in Canada...need one on Canada??? Hehehe

Paul (PaulCNCMann)

[gday01]

gday,

After reading everything that has been posted it sounds like your drives may have been contaminated with the foreign objects at the reseller end and you were left holding the bag. After seeing the excellent and neat machine builds you have done that CastCNC attested to I believe that the contamination was not due to anything you did.

We are more than happy to replace all four G203Vs and will ship them out tomorrow.

As mentioned previously we only see what comes through the doors here. We manufacture all of our drives in our plant where we do no metal turning so we can ensure that all of our drives ship free of contaminants. If a drive comes back here for evaluation and it has conductive material on the PCB it is generally something that happened in a machining environment. Because you said this is not the case it sounds like you may have gotten the short end of the stick, and we would like to make sure that you are not out the $600 due to a third party's problem.

Marcus

I want to say that I am Humbled by your generosity and respect! I would have been happy just to get what I felt was fair, I did wire 2 0f the drives incorrectly during the confusion of a bad ribbon cable.

I will never mention this again, except in a complimentary way, or claim any kind of victory. I think this is just great customer service.

I think we were a victim of circumstance. Thanks for your understanding!
Gary

[CastCNC]

Marcus, you have gone above and beyond. I wanted to say I can certainly understand how you can only know the story the drives told you and also want to let you know there are many of us out here much appreciate that you have the insight to see the human at the other end of these messages. I for one am completely won over and I had absolutely nothing to gain in this, my posts were only in support of the person behind your customer based on my own dealings with him.

[Ron Dunn]

Frankly, I think gday01 and CastCNC should be ashamed of their conduct, unethically using this forum to rip off a generous supplier.

You might have got your drives, but you don't get any respect.

CastCNC, I hope that behaviour like this doesn't come back to bite you in your own business.