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I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're st

by jwr 6mo ago

I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced. Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.

badlucklottery 6mo ago
Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1. I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation. But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench. The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software. On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.