3020 Pro Max CNC Metal Engraver by Sainsmart Genmitsu - Build, test and review

interested in the science smart gen mitsu 3020 pro max then stick around because that's what we're covering in this episode hey everyone and welcome to another episode of james dean designs if you're new to the channel and love cnc hit that subscribe button in the corner to get all the latest videos in today's episode we're going to be taking a look at the same smart gen mitsu 3020 pro max now i have to say thank you to science smart straight away they've been very kind to send me this before it has actually been released to the market so if anything changes in terms of the official setup instructions i'll put an update in the description area below the video do check that area out it's where i put all the useful information such as bits and files that we might use throughout the videos now what we're going to do to today is get everything unboxed check out what you get in the kit itself get it all assembled do some testing at the end to see what its capabilities are but what we're going to do first is talk about the specifications of this machine we basically know this is a 3018 pro on steroids so tech let's take a look at what those upgrades are and what makes this particular machine so special so the information you all want to know well it looks like the 3018 pro but when it comes to the numbers there are some differences the width of your work area is 300 millimeters wide but the wire travel is now 200 millimeters wide giving you an extra 20 millimeters on that more crucially the z travel is now 72 millimeters so comparison to uh 3018 pro which i think is 40 millimeters that's a significant increase on how much your zed can go up and down now the footprint of the machine is 391 millimeters deep 461 millimeters deep and around 360 millimeters high obviously depending on how high or low you fit your spindle into that obviously for the terms of an enclosure or something you want to add a little bit onto that to give yourself a bit of breathing room now the machine itself obviously you can see straight away one of the biggest improvements it is now all metal all the biker light solid plates and things have all gone it's all made out of aluminium obviously with the rails and stuff being steel so that just really increases how solid this machine is the z assembly as well again is all metal and that's to enable to support this 300 watt air cooled spindle this is fitted with an er11 collet as well so if you already have a machine that takes an r11 collet you can continue to use the same nuts inserts and crucially the same cnc bits as well now to support this all metal z assembly one of the biggest upgrades is the fitting of linear rails on the x-axis this just adds so much extra support to um this whole setup here and really makes it solid enabling us to be able to machine harder materials which is obviously one of the main focuses of this new machine now the bed is cast aluminium with lots of pre-threaded holes to be able to put your clamps in again it's just a really nice feature and if i'm honest it looks really cool it's got a grid engraved on it on top of it as well with some numbers running on the different axis to help with alignment and sizing this also sits on two upgraded rails and these are 12 millimeters in diameter which given that they're only 300 millimeters long really solid and just takes any movement out of the bed itself the thread rods are now um connected with upgraded couplers as you can see much bigger much better grip just to minimize any of that slipping when you are pushing the machine a little bit too hard they've also been fitted with knobs on the end of each thread rod to allow you to move things around a bit more um so manually to be honest the uh electronics let's talk about those so obviously one thing that a pro didn't have was limit switches but the prover did have them so kind of what they've done is taken some of the best features from the two different machines and incorporated them into this so you've got three limit switches on each one on each axis with an optional fourth limit switch for the bottom of the zed which they do supply you that as well the three limit switches allow you to harm the machine which is nice useful feature to always return to the same position remember the coordinates of jobs there are different uses for it so it's a nice feature to have also an e-stop fitted on the far right hand side safety feature should anything go wrong just hit it completely shuts the machine down and minimizes any damage um what else can we talk about um they supply you with an insert for the z carriage to be able to take a laser as well and obviously the laser can then connect to the control board itself so again you can use this for spindle work or for a laser it's not been released yet but it can also take a fourth axis there's an extra connection on the control board to allow a fourth axis for this so when saying smart release that again it's going to be a really cool feature and upgrade now i think that pretty much covers the specifications of this machine so let's move on so with the numbers and specifications out the white safe to say there are a lot of useful upgrades in the machine that are really going to help us out so let's move on unbox everything and show you the extra bits that you get in the kit and then move on to getting it all assembled so after unpacking everything you can see we get quite a bit in the box itself we've obviously got the base which is the y-axis and the bed we've got the x-axis and the z-assembly now all of this comes 90 complete there's just a few things we've got to do to finish it off which we'll move on to shortly we have the power pack we have the control board a 300 watt air cooled spindle we've got a usb cable an emergency stop button offline controller limit switches we have an adapter ring this goes in here to take a standard 33 mil laser so that can be very useful extra cables to connect all the stepper motors up and cable tidies obviously a set of v bits that come with the machine then various bolts and accessories to allow us to assemble this and get it all wired up correctly so yeah you really do get quite a bit of kit in this box now i'm very cautious before i start assembling this any bolts are in awkward positions such as the bottom of the zed assembly or underneath the bed i like to go around and make sure they are tight before i start assembling anything it's also a good time to talk about loctite now i've mentioned this before in previous videos essentially this is a bit like a soft glue that helps hold bolts in place now this machine is very sturdy and is unlikely to need it however it is a safety precaution if you want to use it you just take the bolts out apply a slight drop and put the bolts back in and it will hold them more secure you're not going to see me use it during the video purely because it can get messy if i have to take bolts back out to re-shoot but it is something to consider so for the first part of the assembly we're going to drop in at the spring t-nuts these have a slight spring ball bearing on the back and they're designed to sit in there and not come out very easily so do be careful when you put them in the hole is offset from the center the hole is closer to one side than the other and when you're placing them in the hole should be towards the front of the machine we have eight in total for each side so that is four on the top slot and four on the bottom slot we'll then flip it around and do the other side and exactly the same when we flip it around remember again the holes should be facing towards the front the instructions say these holes should be spaced 20 millimeters apart so that's what i'm going to do now i'm going to rest the first on the top and bottom at the back of the frame and then spice the holes out roughly 20 millimeters and we'll do the same on the other side so we're going to exactly the same again but on the opposite side now obviously we've spun it round so the holes that are offset need to go towards the front which is now the opposite end so we'll drop these all in again make sure they click in i have noticed some are a little bit tighter than others some are a bit loose so just put them in the best you can and when we come to bolt it up all being well everything should align i'm just going to drop these out in and click them and i'll finish the rest of this off now so they're all in and again space 20 millimeters apart so we can now bring the x-axis gun tree in drop that in place and start to get the bolts in so this next step is going to be one of the fiddliest parts of the setup because we've got to get all the holes aligned to the nuts that are in position now as a quick tip if you turn the rubber foot out slightly it will protrude a bit further than the extrusion itself and it will just allow the x axis of the x assembly to sit on top of it so if i lower this in place just keeping it aligned with the back of the frame itself as we can see there and then it should make it much easier to get the bolt in underline that because it is the correct height now i'm going to go around and do the eight on this side and then the eight on the other side what i would suggest doing at this point just do them finger tight we don't want to tighten them up too much because we've got to adjust the back depth of this shortly so i'll continue and finish this off now so we did the other side i've just put two in the opposite side so you could spin it round without me disturbing everything now i'm going to continue to put the other six bolts in this side as well you do need to wiggle it about a bit just to find the center of those nuts but once you actually get a few in place everything starts to align up and it makes it really easy and fast just to drop them all in so i just tightened all these to finger tight so there is still a little bit of play in them and i've just brought the gantry into it is 13 millimeters from the back of the frame you can just do this by wobbling it slightly and it will give you a little bit of movement but we want 13 millimeters from the edge of this gantry here to the edge of the frame there i'm just going to tighten all these up with the allen key just to get them all pinched up and secure and then we'll do the same on the other side as well to make sure that gantry is also 13 millimeters in what we'll also be doing a little bit later is just checking that the gantry is square to the bed itself now you don't want to tighten these up too much just in case you need to adjust this but we need to tighten it up enough so that we can move things around and for it to stay in place and then once we've done that check later on for square we'll come back and pinch all these up fully just to make sure it's tight so before i tighten all these bolts up i want to check that the bed is actually square with the assembly itself so i've just dropped a square through the uh spindle holder and i can see from looking down there that it aligns square with the spindle holder itself just as a secondary check i'm going to move the bed this way and also put a square on the back to make sure it aligns with the aluminium extrusion on the back again just to make sure it's all as square as possible so obviously i know this square is now leaning off a bit because it's falling forward but i can also see on the back as well that this is all sitting square so i'm pretty happy with how this is and i'm going to make sure we tighten all of those bolts up on either side it's also a good point at this time with your squares out just again to check the squareness of the frame just to be safe we'll get all these bolts pinched up make sure everything's secure and then move on to the next step so the instructions say at this stage to install the feet but mine already came installed so we're going to move on and install the e-stop through this hole here now the first thing you'll need to do is to remove the washer and the plastic bracket off the end of the e-stop we're then just going to feed the cable through this hole pull it all the way through and the e-stop should sit in there nice and comfortably you then need to thread the washer and the plastic retaining nut back over the cable itself i should point out there are slight little claws on these the way science smart set it up is these point back in towards the machine itself so we'll slide that on and then we'll slide the nut on as well now once in place you'll want to make sure this is pushed all the way through slide the washer over bring the nut back up and then attach that also thread it on make sure it's pinched nice and tight to hold the e-stop in place now we'll cover this a bit later obviously once you've done that make sure you rotate the e-stop so that it pops back out obviously that will cause you issues later on if it remains depressed so we're going to move on and install the limit switches there is one at the top of the z-axis one at the far right of the x-axis and then the one at the front on the y-axis now there are two different bolt lengths for this one is 12 millimeters the other is 10 millimeters now the x and the y they both have the 12 millimeter bolt the one that goes into the z that will use the 10 millimeter bolt so we're going to work through and put those in i should also point out all the limit switches have the same length cable so they can't go anywhere you don't need to put them in a particular order as long as each set has its own limit switch so we're going to work around them and put those in now you may have just seen how to lower the z-axis down slightly in order to get the limit switch in just make sure that when you are installing them obviously everything remains away from each other otherwise you won't be able to install them if you haven't left enough gap between them now you'll also notice there are two holes at the bottom of the z-axis this is for an optional z-limit switch now the difference is the three limit switch that we've already installed allows you to do homing this optional limit switch is more like a safety device to stop the z-axis from going too low i'm going to leave it off for today but you can install it if you want by doing exactly the same process so we're about to install the control board and you'll need the m5 10 millimeter bolts with the t-nuts now these are hammer t-nuts what that basically means is they can drop straight into the slots they don't have to be slid in from the side so you've got a choice you can either place them all in and then try and align the holes up or do what i've done here put them all on just put the nuts on by about one turn and that way you can simply place it in position the t-nuts will go in push the bolts in and then when you start to tighten them up it will all hold itself in place and to me that's just a little bit easier than trying to align all the bolts and keep shuffling everything about so the next stage is to install the spindle now your bolts may already be in place on the holder but if like mine they may have been separate so we need to put these in first you've got a long bolt and a square nut now this can be a bit fiddly because those gaps are quite big so just drop that in use something like a small screwdriver that actually comes with the kit place the bolt through and just push it up to it gently and then just try and get that first thread on and once it grips you'll be okay then we're going to do that with the second bolt as well the bolts can go in before putting the spindle in because it doesn't apply pressure until you really start to tighten them up a little bit at the end so we'll just get this one in place as well there we are they're both just grip now now what we can do is drop the spindle in and tighten both of those up so i'm keeping the wires to the spindle to the right hand side so it's closer to the control board and once you drop the spindle in you want to lower it down quite a bit but leave a bit of a gap between the wire and the holder itself and then just tighten the bolts up until it starts to pinch the spindle do them evenly as you can as you're going through and it just saves applying uneven pressure to the spindle itself and once it starts to clamp it will hold the spindle in place and then you can just do it with the other way to put the final tightening turn on make sure it's holding it well obviously after doing this just make sure everything is still turning freely and you're good to go so we're now going to move on and install the cables for the stepper motors now there are two different connectors on either end of the cable one is a wider connector the other one is narrower the wider connector is the one that goes to the stepper motor itself and the narrower connector will go to the control board shortly now all the cables are the same length so you can put them in any order so we're just going to work around now and connect them i should also point out the connectors can only go in one way there are two arrows on one side of the connector and there are also gaps on the undersides of the connectors on the stepper motors but where these little arrows go so just place them in and you should feel it click with a little bit of pressure now everything is starting to get a bit messy cable wise but we're just going to finish one other thing up and then get all this tidied up so we now need to fit the extension cable to the spindle to allow it to reach the control board now it might sound obvious but the red goes to the red and the black goes to the black these are non-return clips so you don't actually need a screwdriver to use them you just simply press the button down on the top it opens up the mouth of the clip itself and then you slide the cable in there so once that's open slot it in make sure it's in all the way release it and that applies enough pressure to stop the cable from being pulled out we'll do the same with the black as well press the button down slide it in release it and it's all gripped up we're then going to connect the other end of the extension cable to the control board now there is this block of four connectors the two on the left hand side are for the power coming into the spindle the two on the right hand side for the power going back out to the spindle and that's where we'll connect the extension now the furthest one to the right is the negative or the black and then the next one in is the red so we'll simply place both of the connectors into the slots push them down make sure they are sitting in there very well and then use the screwdriver provided just tighten those up make sure they're clamped in place now once you've done so it's worth just trying to pull them back out to make sure they are secure and those definitely held in place now we're now going to connect the remaining cables to the control board there are terminal blocks at the top and there are blocks at the bottom as well the ones on top are for the stepper motors the ones on the bottom are for the limit switches now you may notice that certain terminals have two so for example we've got one x but two y now as this machine only has one y stepper motor there is a spare one and that's what will be used for the fourth axis when sound smart release it now wherever there are two terminals safety thing to do it's just connected to the first one so we're gonna go around we're gonna connect the x the y and the z stepper motors then do the same underneath for the limit switches there are two of each limit switches terminals underneath again we're just going to connect it to the first one for each so one for the x1 for the y and one for the z we'll get on and do that now make sure that all of your cables are untangled as you're plugging them in it just helps keep the cabling much tidier so we're going to start by connecting the z and then move around and do the others so i'm going to begin by connecting the x limit switch at the bottom so i'm just going to twist that red again the arrows on the connector go towards the gaps on the terminals so it's going to slide that in make sure it clicks i'm also then going to connect the z limit switch again we'll do the same we'll find the z limit switch which is here push that in and the reason i've left the wire out is i want to run the cable underneath the board now most of the cables are all towards the right hand or the back of the machine the only one that's of a slight concern is the y-axis limit switch now the instructions are not that clear on where to put this i think i'm going to feed it underneath the rail and then what i'm going to do is feed it towards the back but underneath the bed itself and what i will come back and do a little bit later after connecting this is make sure you've got enough playing the cable and try and sit it in the channel underneath here either holding it in with a zip tie a little bit of tape just to keep it tucked out of the way and minimize anything rubbing or catching on it and finally we will connect the y as a quick tip before you start to tidy the cables up for the spindle and the z-axis push everything as far away from the control board as possible lower the spindle all the way down and that gives you an indication of how much slack cable you need to leave before tidying everything up so i'm going to make sure i've got enough for this to move about and the spindle can go up and down without rubbing on anything pinch these cables up maybe with a zip tie and then start to put the spiral connect spiral tide is around everything so i should start by saying there is no correct way to do this it's all about just making sure the cables are neat tidy and secure now i've started off by cables and going in the same direction combining those so we have the z-axis stepper motor the z-axis limit switch and the spindle power cable all in one here the x and y stepper motors i've combined at the bottom and then fed those up in a spiral bind and also the limit switches and done the same there along with the e-stop and then combine those two together with a couple of zip ties now will i change this going forward i might it depends on whether i feel that anything can be improved with the way i've secured these in one thing i should point out is that when you've got something like the setup over here where you've got the x axis constantly moving and the z carriage going up and down you may consider using something more secure to hold this cable down to the carriage itself and minimize any unnecessary pressure on these terminals as it's going back and forth so i'll probably look at making that improvement in the future but for now i'm happy with the way this is let's make the final connection that we need which is now putting the psu the power supply into the control board similar scenario again we have a red wire and a black wire marked up as positive and negative so we'll place those both into the terminals a little bit of pressure to push them in make sure they are sitting well come back in with the screwdriver tighten them up and again just make sure everything is secure tight try pulling them out make sure they don't move and that's that done so a very simple setup procedure which is exactly what we want from a machine like this so now let's move on get everything ready for our first test cut and then after that we'll do a couple of additional cuts just to see what the machine is capable of so let's physically get the machine set up obviously to begin with we'll need a scrap piece of material to do a test i'm just going to be using an off cut of pine today it can be a bit fibrous and doesn't always machine the best but for a test it's absolutely fine now quick tip from me always um clamp your material down or secure your material before installing the bit if you're moving around underneath and you've got a sharp bit in you can run the risk of hitting your fingers now we're going to be using the clamps today i usually prefer blue type and ci glue but we're going to use the clamps because they come in the kit the correct way to set them up is to have the normal bolt going through the wider gap with the wing nut and the washer below it have the cross head nut going upwards and that basically acts as a foot for the clamp so you then come over to one of the threaded holes and just give it a couple of turns make sure that it is well gripped if it's only got something like half a turn when you start to apply the upward pressure it runs the risk of damaging the thread so you want to make sure it's got a good couple of turns in there the other crucial part is you always want the plate to be facing slightly down or at least parallel if it goes the other way where it's pointing upwards and away from the material it effectively pushes the material away from it and you run the risk of obviously your material coming loose so i'm just going to turn that down just a little bit try and get it close to parallel and then pinch up the wing nut just to ensure that this is clamped down this can be a little bit fiddly but they do ultimately work as clamps obviously as you tighten it up make sure everything's aligned on the bed and that just helps keep everything neater so we'll give that a pinch up i'm going to do the same on this side now and put that in place now obviously one thing to note is i'm quite close to the edge of the bed here so you can either put these at an angle i'm just to ensure that it grips down and that just minimizes obviously the solid bolt coming off the edge of the bed itself now the test file that we're doing today is about 50 millimeters wide so i've got all this area to play with if you are doing a design that comes close to the edge obviously be careful where you put the position of the clamps as if then close the corners it can often interfere with that [Music] so let's move on and install a bit now now the bits that come with the kit are 20 degree v bits they are extremely sharp so i always leave the cap on whilst fitting i don't know if the camera can just pick up on that there is a machined a flat edge and then a ridge right there i'll show you where that ridge goes in terms of inserting it shortly i'm going to put the cap back on and then make sure your nut is loose and that should just slide up nice and easy hold it in place and then just tighten the nut up with your hand and it will start to pinch the bit up now once it's pinched it use your spanners tighten this up and just make sure that it's all secured if you're unsure how deep to put the bit in these 20 degree v bits have a flat edge and machined on them with a little ridge at the top i put that ridge right at the bottom of the collet and that's how deep i like to put them into the er 11 collet so now we're on the pc let's get everything set up obviously some of you may be familiar with this process so you can skip ahead if you just want to see some of the results further into the video but we're going to start by opening up the memory stick so plug in the memory stick to your pc or laptop and then open the folder up you should see a selection of files or folders that look something like this we're going to begin by going into the software folder and then opening up the driver folder now the driver allows your machine to talk to your pc or laptop and therefore can communicate and get your jobs done so we're going to open this file up now the screen will go dark for a second and it is just a security message click yes and then you'll be presented with this screen here click install let it run through and once it's complete we can then click ok there we are click ok close all this down and that's the driver installed now at this point we need to know what port the now at this point we need to know what port the cnc machine is connected to on the computer so we're going to come down to the start menu and we're going to type device manager and then click into this once it loads come down to ports expand the menu and you should see that something that looks similar to the driver we just installed ch340 it is on com 6. make a note of com6 we'll need that shortly when we open up the control software so i'm just going to close this back down i'm going to go back one level on the folders now grbl control commonly known as candle is the piece of software that they always supply with these desktop machines if you've seen my previous videos i don't like candle i think it's a little bit glitchy and lacks some features so for this video i'm going to be using ugs or universal g-code sender if you're unfamiliar with this you can simply google ugs and it's going to be the first result that comes up go to the download page and you can select the relevant installation packet for your setup i've already got ugs installed so i'm now going to minimize this and open ugs up so with ugs open we can see our job controller the visualization in the console area if you can't see any of these tabs and settings you can come up to the menus at the top and turn them on on the different plug-in options and it just puts the tabs back into place now we need to get ugs to connect to the machine so the first thing we come and do is refresh the port selection and this will just check what ports are available for us to connect to we just noted that that was karma 6 so we're going to select that you also need to make sure the board rate is correct at 11 52 0 0 so with both of those settings correct we can come over to the plug symbol here and click connect now it takes a second but as soon as it loads up it will give us an alarm state this is because we've got limit switches installed and the settings know this so by default it flags the alarm code just as a safety feature the first thing we need to do is click unlock and it will release this so with that released we can now start to control our machine and just test that things are okay so the first thing we're going to do is just jog everything about just set some low values such as 20 millimeters and make sure everything moves left right back and forth so i'll quickly run through this now tested the x and y we'll also do the same on the z axis just raise it up and then lower it back down as a quick test i'm going to fire the spindle up and make sure that works we're going to do this with the console and the command line so we come down to the command line and we're going to type m3 s 10 000 now we should hit enter and this should start the spindle off to stop it we'll type m5 and hit enter so there you go you've learnt a little bit of g g-code as well m3 simply means to start it at a speed of 10 000. the m5 is the signal to stop the spindle so at this stage we know everything is running as it should we've done some basic tests and it jogs about the next step is for us to load a test file in so we're going to come up to the open folder and we're going to head to the memory stick and we're going to go into test codes then into genmitsu logo on board and at this point i'm just going to say a thank you to soundsmart for listening to people now there are two files in this folder one is called a tap and one is called the text the one that we actually need is the tap file however i'm just going to briefly come back out and open the text file in that folder to show you something now one issue i've always had with the memory sticks that come with the machines is i don't tell you anything about the test files that they provide you so if i open this toolpath summary file up we can see it has some basic information about what is actually in that test file in terms of the feeds speeds and the bit being used so we can clearly see the tool is a 20 degree v bit we can see the right that it is running at and we can also say the speeds that it is estimated to be doing now this bit of information is just very useful if you're loading in a file that you have never seen or you didn't create yourself because it just gives you a bit of background about what to do and how it's going to handle it so we'll close that down we'll come back over to ugs and we'll open that tap file now when it loads in on the visualizer we can see straight away it's the word gen mitsu we can see it's just simply going to cut an outline of each letters and we've got some measurements to support that so 40 millimeters wide just over 6 millimeters long and i'm going to guess this is 5.5 so 5 millimeters of safety travel height and 0.5 millimeters of depth into the wood itself now this is going to be quite gentle given that it's a soft wood but we can see from the visualization it will do several light passes before completing the job so the next thing we need to do is set the z position or the start position now as we can see from the visualization this will be beginning in the bottom left hand corner of the test foil so we need to make sure this is the bit on our cnc machine is towards the bottom left hand corner on the test piece of wood now i've already roughly got it positioned but we need to set the height of the zed so we're going to lower this down slowly and you just want the tip of the bit to touch the top of the material now if you want to be precise you can use i z probe check out the links in the corner on how to set up a zed probe but we're just going to do this manually for the time being so we'll set the z step size to one millimeter and we'll lower it down slowly so that is now just touching the top of the wood a good test is if you put a piece of paper underneath the bit and lower it down slowly when the bit starts to drag on the piece of paper you know you're pretty much on the top of the material so because i'm happy with the position on the x y and the z axis i'm going to come up to this button that says reset zero and that just remembers the position that it is in now in order to start and finish the job so with everything set we can click play and let this do the test run so a nice easy one to get us started with it came out clean there are no missteps no jagged lines that sort of thing so it indicates everything is working as we expect let's move on to something a bit more challenging now on the memory stick there are some 3d relief files from carvco these are two stage files it's where you do a roughing pass to clear a lot of the material and then you do a detail pass at the end so let's see how we get on with that so the test file i'm about to do now is a 3d relief valve from kafka we can see it's 84 millimeters on the y-axis and about 140 for 140 millimeters on the x-axis now to find this file if you go back up to the test codes folder test files from kafko and we've loaded in the 3d gecko now you'll see there are two tap files in here and it gives the name of each bit that you need to use with it a 3.175 end mill and then a 0.1 conical which is basically a v bit so we'll come back over to ugs i've set the position on the piece of scrap wood where i need it to start do note the center of this is the starting position not the bottom left as it was in the previous test file so you need to make sure your bit is set to the center of your material before starting this job with my bit positioned correctly i'm going to come up and click reset zero to set the new start position and with that loaded we'll click play and get the job started [Music] so this did take quite a few hours to complete but the result is lovely considering how fine of a tip this is it is so smooth i haven't had to sand anything and as also mentioned given that it's pine as well which can be fibrous yeah it's come out really nice the detail in the fins on its back and underneath its mouth and nice and sharp there was a slight rough edge around the um the oval now i don't know if that was as a result of the test spoil or the machine itself so if you do this cut as well let me know how you get on but considering this is our second cut on this machine it has come out absolutely brilliant so i don't think there was any doubt about this machine's capability in terms of its engraving and cutting on wood i should also mention i did a sound test during that piece as well it was averaging out at about 68 decibels maybe a fraction lower so that's actually pretty quiet and you can still hold a conversation over that whilst the machine's running so yeah just a great sign of how quiet this machine can be now for the final test let's move on to something a bit more challenging i've got a piece of aluminium bar that i'm going to try and engrave now i should mention straight away this is my first time engraving metal the aluminium bar isn't perfectly flat i've sanded it as flat as i can get it but there are some minor high and low points but the machine should hopefully handle that absolutely fine now to say it is my first time so i'm taking the feeds and speeds fairly slow and steady i'm going to be doing 0.1 millimeters per pass at a speed of 400 millimeters per minute but yeah let's uh let's get this started and see how we get on and i'm going to be engraving a small jd logo into this around 45 millimeters square so let's see how we get on hopefully it will be a success but we'll catch up at the end of this video so even though the bar wasn't perfectly flat it's actually done a great job of engraving it the lines are nice and crisp and sharp the detail is there in the letters with nice sharp edges and everything looks even and flat now i know a lot of you think i have plenty of time with these machines to get them set up dialed in before i start doing any filming but the truth is everything you've seen in today's videos this machine straight out of the box no modifications no no tweaks no tests that i haven't filmed so to be able to do a good quality 3d relief carving on my second job and to be able to do a flawless metal engraving in my third job and i've never done metal engraving before i think the results speak for themselves and it shows just how good these upgrades are that science smart have made to the machine i'm genuinely looking forward to pushing this further and doing more metal work just to see what it really is capable of now is the machine flawless i always like to ask this question when doing an initial review of a machine well to be honest with that i am struggling to find things that i dislike about the machine as i say it really ticks pretty much every box for me there is one niggly little thing i think sounds smart could have put the e stop in a slightly better position um the terminals from it kind of sticking to where the work area is near that limit switch as well so i just think that that probably could have done been done a little bit cleaner if science smarter watching maybe a smaller e-stop or just rotate it around 90 degrees you know just uh just a suggestion now i have no doubt that some of you are going to come forward and say why didn't they do this upgrade why didn't they go with that part the honest answer is i don't really know i'm not saying tomorrow you'll have to ask them but if i had to guess i would say one of two reasons either those upgrades would push into the next price bracket and therefore out of reach of a lot of people or ultimately because they're not needed now you know i've put this through some tests already i can honestly say the machine is solid there's no deflection i am so happy with how far this machine has come from what was the original 3018 pro and yet as i said earlier looking forward to really pushing it more going forward now at the time of making this video soundsmarter about to do an early bird early release special on this so i think the price to market is 499 us dollars before that you get a lot of extras like extra bits a one-year subscription to kavco which in itself is worth about 190 so actually it is a brilliant offer if you're watching this uh video just as the machines come out i would definitely jump on that check out the links in the description area if you want to go ahead and buy that video but yeah keep an eye out because i am going to be doing a lot more with this machine and yeah having a little bit of fun with it that is everything for today's video i know you're going to have questions so chat with me down below because i really am excited about this machine and want to talk to you all about it so yeah thank you for watching final thanks as always goes to my patrons i'll see you all on the next episode

Channel: James Dean Designs

Views: 11,898

Keywords: 3020 Max Pro, 3020, 3020 pro, 3020 max, 3020 review, 3020 build, metal engraving, metal engraver, PROVERXL 4030, PROVER XL 4030, 4030 XL, CNC, 4030, Sainsmart, PROVERXL 4030 build, small cnc, desktop cnc, laser cnc, woodworking cnc, woodworking, test cut, CNC software, Using 4030, 4030 beginner, CNC beginner, cnc tips tricks, cnc help, cnc beginner, cnc review, 4030 review, Sainsmart Genmitsu, Prover, 3018, 3018 pro, 3018 prover

Id: r7M6e5n44BQ

Length: 40min 20sec (2420 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021