Originally Posted by
allanjs
Pretorien,
I own one of those mills listed on ebay and sold by alexbrod.
It is an extremely light duty mill and a lousy drilling machine.
The cnc electronics are way higher quality and price than what
is needed. The machine starts as a Harbor Freight mill. Supposedly
made by Sieg but I think they are Sieg's rejects. Plastic gears in the
head that don't take much abuse at all. I can't count how many times
I have replaced or repaired them. Thanks to Littlemachineshop.com I
keep a supply on hand. The spindle motor is way light duty
and I had to change to slow-blow fuses. Alex changes the table to
a much larger one. That is a good thing although the quality is poor.
Does not have ball screws and the backlash is horrible. The programmable
indexer is very sloppy POS. I have had to repair mine a number of times.
My advise is step up to at least the x2 if not even x3 or super x3 and
cnc it yourself. By the way, it will handle up to a 1/2" shank tooling.
I do not mean for this posting to reflect badly in any way on alexbrod.
His role in this is cnc'ing the machine and as I stated earlier the electronics
are top quality for a machine this size. The mechanics of the x1 just don't
don't cut it. I do use mine on an almost daily bassis and it has payed
for itself a few time over, but not without a lot of frustration and it just
can't mill fast. Depending on material and depth of cut etc. the best I get
is 3 IPM feed rates. Also, if you need parts from harbor Freight, it takes
months.
Al