This is to let all members, new and old to the Carbide 3D comunity know about my experience with the support from Carbide 3D.
First off a brief over view of what I’m doing. I own a small woodworking business that I have been slowly starting up sense the beginning of the year. I work primarily with Hawaiian woods Koa, MilIo, Mango etc. I wanted to make small boxes out of a solid pice of wood and after trying this with a router and gig by hand it was massively evident that I was going to need a better way of getting it done (CNC).
I found Carbide 3D after watching a video on funding the Nomad sorry can’t remember which one it was. Anyway after calling Carbide 3D and speaking with Apollo for roughly 30 minutes or so I decided to buy a Shakeoko 3. Once put together and figured out the how too’s I was off and running with good results.
At this point my little endeavor had grown in size and was no longer able to fit in a 2 car garage with the 2 cars in it. My sister and her husband had bought a new house that low and behold had a wood shop already setup in one of the garages. After doing a clean out I proceeded to assemble the new shop, dust colletion and various tools and yes the S3.
Now heres where things go south for me, Im ready to get working again as I have been spending time (3 weeks) moving and putting the shop together. I went to run a basic program, 8 holes 1.5 x 5.5mm for magnets that hold the lid to the box and for no reason the job would just stop.
I though Ok it’s a grounding issue that I had missed somewhere when putting things back together. I went over everything and could not fine anything I had missed. I then ran the program in the air with nothing in the shop running but the S3 no router just the CNC and it would just stop running intermittently, some times the job would go 20% sometimes it would go 80% other times it would only run 3%.
So I went to the community and asked for help [Carbide motion update](http://Carbide motion update) thinking it might be a software issue. After trying some of the recomended troubleshoots I still had the same problem. So I stepped it up and went down to Carbide 3D seeing how they are somewhat local to me.
After dropping in on Apollo unexspectedly he gave about 2.5 hours of his morning to try and help me find my problem. We tried various things which didn’t yield any fixes. Apollo suggested that I start a ticket with support, feeling somewhat dejected I went home and started a ticket with support and was now in communication with Edward.
After a few emails back and forth Edward wanted to send me a new control board to see if that would work. The next day I had a new Control board in hand and went to the shop and installed it, fire everything up and still the same problem. Now Edward seems to think it has something to do with the USB in my computer (2008 iMac) running El Cap. I’m a Mac guy so I figure ok I will try my personal iMac 24 same year same OS and same thing.
Now I didn’t really want to believe that both iMac computers have the same problem with USB, I mean the 20" had been running the S3 sense February with no problems what so ever and now my personal iMac has the same issue having never been hooked up to the CNC at all.
Edward now wants to send me a Windows Tablet just to eliminate my computer as the problem. The files that I had built on my machine had no problems running on his computers to compleation. So I’m game, by the way Edward had to buy another Tablet to send me as all the ones they had were in use.
I receive the Tablet and after loading up CC and building a file it ran the S3 with out any problems several times, thank god I can produce again.
Summing up!
Carbide 3D has sent me a new Control board (v2.4) at there expense and a Windows Tablet again at there exspense to try a different computer for a process of elimination to simply find out that not one but two of my iMac computers have a USB problem.
Now if this is not customer service I don’t know what is… I am trying to start a small business and I am not tech savoy when it comes to computers so to me these little things can be extremely frustrating. To have another small business step up and jump through the hoops to find out that your problem is your computer at there exspense is commendable and worth mentioning and quite frankly what makes a good company great!
So, special thanks to Apollo Crow, Edward Ford and Gorge Sanchez for going the extra mile to make sure the customer satisfied!
Chris Kwiatkowski
Moku Nui Wood Designs.