Thanks for the feedback, Luke. I’m sure you’re really proud of this machine, and I think you have every justification to be.
Good luck with the pre-orders and sales, but it seems buyers in the UK won’t benefit from this for quite some time anyway, particularly as it can only be shipped on a pallet!
If You could find a freight forwarding company, like I did with my Midwest steel and aluminium ATP5 plates, there is nothing stopping Europeans from ordering a HDM.
The price of freight, insurance, vat and other fees will be a good deterrent though…
Random question - is the electronics control board is the same physical size as the Shapeoko line?
Are you able to elaborate on why? It doesn’t make much sense to me. I assume the fear would be an eternal “why would I buy the Shapeoko 6 today when I can wait a couple of months and get a Shapeoko 7” but in this case, the HDM is your most expensive machine. The people who are upset it wasn’t announced earlier would have been waiting to give you more money than they spent on their Shapeoko 3/4/Pro, so releasing the roadmap would have been profitable.
Or is the concern that some unscrupulous Chinese company will just go to market first with low-price garbage?
Getting into the DIY mill thing myself, I wonder, did you ever consider alternative options like epoxy pours for flat mounting surfaces, milling mounting surfaces that then bolt on to the extrusion or epoxy granite? Do approaches like those not work well or not scale well to production?
There are some other competitors around these days as well. The Shariff DMC2 KickStarter has a similar price point but makes different tradeoffs.
Yes - we plan to support our machines.
The electronics box is quite a bit bigger now and mounts else where.
No.
We put everything in a HAAS - it’s about as flat as you are going to get at this stage.
We’re familiar that’s is the one where they bolt HGH15 to steel box section? Personally I won’t ever back a Kickstarter again - 0/2.
@jepho if you want specifics on all the above I’d suggest emailing sales@carbide3d.com - however to address some of your questions:
In a similar way that we support for current users with a few tweaks which is not dis-similar to these competitors. We have a central support team that picks up all queries and manages the tickets and draft in the relevant people as and when. Spare parts/replacements are also managed centrally. The design of the HDM allows for a ‘modular exchange program’ where if a fault was found and it was not a user serviceable part a whole axis or major component could be swapped out relatively easily. All parts would be on an exchange only i.e. the faulty part would need to be returned to us and if it wasn’t it would be charged or all warranty would be void.
The community is a community, not a support mechanism for support. As always any and all support queries should be emailed into support@carbide3d.com.
Pardon? We have around 10 beta HDM’s out in the world and we are in production on the customer machines.
I don’t see any ticket or emails from you - where did you send these questions to?
Hey, @WillAdams, what’s the “Osborne Effect”?
EDIT: I’ve found it:
“The Osborne Effect is a reduction in sales of current products after the announcement of a future product. The name of the effect comes from a computer company called Osborne Computer Corporation.”
Yes, however right now we are only taking US orders. For other models we operate almost global support and sales.
Will is being helpful, we try to make it very clear in other posts.
That isn’t an issue, if it’s not right for you it’s not right - best of luck with your venture.
Erm, so if a modular part is defective and is to be returned by the customer to the US and to wait for a replacement to be returned
Erm, are you sure, @jepho?
Our thought was we’d ship the replacement, it would be swapped out by the customer and the old unit shipped back. That way the customer has minimal downtime.
However:
I experienced that when I inquired a UK company about purchasing a couple of custom aluminium enclosures, but due to Brexit they will not accept foreign orders.
That makes more sense, but would the return be at the customers expense - or is it a bit premature to ask that specific question?
Just to be a little pedantic, though, you’re only accepting pre-orders, right?
It’s a little premature but the plan would be to ship it back at our expense. This is all part of the “why” behind not shipping out of the US to start with. We need to figure out the shipping first, and then see if our support plans need to change based on feedback from US customers.
We own the inventory for the first batch except for the electronics, which are in production now. We need to machine the parts, get them anodized, and then begin assembly. We’re calling it a “preorder” because the machines are not ready to ship now (or in the next few days).
It’s worth adding that we’ve already built around ten of this final design, and a lot of the previous iterations before now, so “preorder” doesn’t imply that we have yet to finalize the design.
Thanks, @robgrz, your response is appreciated 
While Im not in the market for one (our next CNC will probably be a larger laser, like 1KW) I got to applaud continuing to make parts here. It looks like a nice machine too, bravo!
Can you tell us details about the spindle please. Is it just a rebadged generic china spindle or did you have a special one made with quality wiring that is properly grounded at the plug and has angular bearings? Also how many bearings does it use? I’m hoping you went the quality route so they don’t fail prematurely.
I have a Mysweety 1.5kw and the wiring inside the case from the plug to the windings is so thin my LED Xmas lights have thicker wires and it wasn’t grounded at the plug. It uses 22 or 23 awg wire at the plug that was such a let down to see.
Will there be a bearing break in procedure or will they be ready to go out of the box?
It’s been made for us and we’re covering it’s warranty for a year so you can be assured it’s pretty good. It is grounded and has DACs in it. We are also doing the wiring on the harness.
We’re also running them in as part of the QC check.
Can you confirm your 1.5kW does not have angular bearings? I saw Marco Reps did a teardown and his was 2 regular bearings disguised as angular contact, and I figure all of them would be like that since straight from China there is 1 target to hit and that is price.
Hi, do you have any picture of the controller box to get a sense of size and how it mounts?
An inside look would be cool too.
Thanks,
Jeffery