[DonK_CO]

Greetings All,
Been wood working for some time and now looking at purchasing a CNC to branch out. Been looking closely at the CNC Shark HD extended. Seems like a pretty good package that comes with vCarve Pro and a laser attachment for $6K. Wanted to see what the consensus was here. Seems this is the place to get some advice from the experienced.
Thanks
Don

[mattcnc123]

hello ,

I don't recommend shark cnc .

if you want to buy from Rockler , I recommend you to buy Axiom cnc router .

that is much better than shark,

[NIC 77]

At first I was thinking good price for a machine with all that.

Then I looked into it. Yeah, that machine sucks. Sorry. Sometimes it is only a matter of meeting your expectations for your budget, so I'm certainly not a CNC snob, being poor myself, I understand what it is to be on a strict budget, but in this case, absolutely everything is as cheap cheap cheap as it can be, and it's really not that inexpensive $$$ wise. There isn't a single component on this that isn't as cheap as they could make it, and the frame is like spaghetti. The thing that cracked me up is the software compensation to measure the unflat areas of the surface you want to cut and compensate. LOL. The table on this isn't flat.....guaranteed. That's why even with a nice looking T slot table you'd still need to add and surface a spoilboard to have a hope of a flat bed, or spend alot of time working with shims and epoxy. And you'd probably go blind mounting a laser on this thing (safety first, I mean it ). The slow speed makes it even more ill suited towards laser work IMO. This is simply my honest unbiased opinion. Don't do it.

Just curious, do you know if these are made in the USA? my guess is that they are made in China and imported, perhaps partially assembled in the US, but that is only a guess, I don't know if it's true. Do you know?

The $6K price you quoted puts it in the same price range as the Saturn or Saturn II series from fineline automation. There is no comparison on what you would be getting as far as the quality is concerned. Proper steel frame, nice gear reduction rack and pinion system, supported square linear rails. The two machines are not in the same class, yet are about the same price. And if you were curious, no I don't work for them, not affiliated with them in any way.

This is a 4' x 4' saturn 2.

https://www.finelineautomation.com/p...c-router-4-x-4

And this is one of the smaller 1st gen saturns, looks like about the same cutting area as the shark, 2' x 4'?

https://www.finelineautomation.com/p...er?taxon_id=54

Good luck to you in your quest. I hope this perspective helps you.

Good thing I'm only on beer two, if I had made it to beer four I wouldn't have been able to be so diplomatic.

[VPcabs]

Where are you located?

[DonK_CO]

I'm in Colorado Springs, CO