Hi,

I am new to this forum and want everyone say hello and thank you for wonderful place! I am a software engineer from Germany and during my part time I am running my still quite small business to develop robots and autonomous vehicles. Currently we are working on developing a fully autonomous drone to delivering stuff.

For developing our prototypes we are currently relaying on 3D printing. We started out with the usual home systems like Makerbot but now advanced to the Hyrel Hydra 640 printer, a solid FDM printer with a quite big heated building chamber. In addition we have a Glowforge Pro laser cutter mainly used to cut some carbon sheets.

While the printer only can produce plastic parts and the laser cutter can only cut in 2D I think we should invest in a decent CNC router to add the possibility for sharping wood and metal in 3D as well. This would complete our set of machinery and will allow us to fabricate our prototypes in a very effective and diverse way. However, as my business is still very small I have to make sure the investment doesn't break the bank. Of course the router has to be a solid and robust maschine with very good quality. As we only manufacture prototypes we don't need a machine with a high output. Professional Routers with a five digit price tag a out of our budget. I may be willing to buy a solid router for the start and add more capabilities and options later on. The bed size doesn't have to be very large as most of our parts are not that big anyway and the space we currently have is limited as well. Something as around 20 x 40 inches would be plenty of space for our jobs.

As mentioned before I would need a model which can handle aluminum on a regular basis and when milling steel with some compromises in speed it would be possible it would be perfect. I would love to have a automatically tool changing system and a vacuum bed for holding the stock material in place easily.

One of my biggest challenges is my wish to have the option to extend the router to a five axes maschine. I fully understand that this is not an easy task and it will add substantial costs, but I have many projects which would require such a set of freedom. The building room would be significant smaller milling in 5 axes but that is okay for me...

I have searched for my a machine matching my requirements and found the PDJ Pilot Pro CNC Router. Does anybody know the company and the device? On the pictures it seems quite solid but I am not sure if the machine has some shortcoming as well... Feel free to check out the website and tell me your options. If you have any other maschine in mind which may match my criteria as well I would be very happy to hear from you as well!

Looking forward for your options and suggestions and thank you for any help and support!