Thread: Bought CNC from China - Yes, you have the right to kick me while I'm down!

Hi stewart and welcome to the forum

That looks like a pretty good CNC machine to me.

Most Chinese stuff isn't that bad. Their main area for falling down seems to be on the electronics side of things.

There will be many people on this forum who will have the expertise to help you. Most are not professionals, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Are you sure that you have a fully licensed version of Mach3, because if you haven't, then you will only be able to cut about 500 lines of code. Most of the Chinese versions of Mach3 are stolen.

Good luck, I think you may be on a winner there.

Hi Stewart,
Jinan CNC are generally well made and should give you good service. Most issues I have read over on the zone are regarding the finishing off. All Chinese CNC's suffer this problem. Before you fire it up it will be wise to go over every nut and bolt and check for tightness, missing spring washers and such. Once you're happy with the mechanical stuff I'd recommend checking all the electrical connectors and terminals. Pay particular attention to earthing on the mains side. Chinese are notorious for leaving out earth connections. If you're not up to the electrical side it would pay to have an electrician check it over and get his blessing before firing it up.

As far as Mach 3 goes, there are lots of tutorials on the machsupport.com site. If you are new to Mach 3, the first thing you need to do is setup the stepping parameters to match the machine. Jinan should have or can provide this. Once you can get it moving around, the rest is just practise.

Getting someone to step you through it may not be so easy but someone else may know somebody in your area.

Steve