BKE Lead 1010 - First CNC Router

So I have been a machine designer and structural designer for hmm a long time!! I have always wanted to get into CNC work and my wife wanted to start making signs for a hobby. I started at the usual websites like Shapeoko and X-Carve but really wanted a lead screw machine. I stumbled onto Openbuilds and was not sure at first but the community offered a ton of info and the guys at the open-builds store responded to my inquires within a day and usually within hours which to me is excellent.

I even looked into ordering a similarly advertised machine from China directly and while I probably would have saved a couple dollars the responses to questions and the forum itself is worth many times the difference I paid, not to mention that the advertised price did not include tariffs, so beware).

So in the end I ordered my machine Friday August 30th before Labor day and I ended up getting it on Thursday Sept. 5th. I was super excited and so was the wife which is extremely unusual for a tool purchase. I was shocked that it ended up being just 2 fairly small boxes. Everything was packaged extremely well and probably could be sold for $100 less if the had less tape and packaging material, however nothing was damaged when it arrived, great job on the packaging.

So I opened everything up and started to build and I followed the videos to do the assembly which by the way was very well done, the only thing I would say is watch all the videos for your machine before you start. there were some steps that I had to disassemble and reassemble because of the flow of the video so watch everything for your particular machine before you jump in. If you follow the entire video, I cannot imagine the build going badly. I will tell you that it takes several hours so don't plan on doing this in a single 2 hour session because it just is not going to happen for most people. I only had one grip about the assembly instructions/video and that was the blackbox controller video. It is virtually useless because it is all at like 10X speed and you just can't do it that fast, I ended up going to the blackbox instructions online and that was much easier.




Made my first cut today and so happy we purchased this machine. It was super fun to build and super satisfying seeing it in action this morning