Advice needed on Flat Cut Letters please?

[Robert Lambie]

depends on CNC machine, make, what you want to cut etc.

haven’t looked in a look time, but guess your looking at £15k upwards.
Obviously cheaper models available from the USA and the like.

however, have a look at phill fentons in-depth tutorial on creating your own, he built one in-house for around £600 and has been producing work on it since.
http://www.uksignboards.com/viewtopic.php?t=56308

[David Mitchell]

thank you robert, and apologies for the need to edit 🙂

membership is the next thing on the list!

[Martin Pearson]

Like Robert says a decent machine will set you back a lot of money if bought new & even good second hand machines hold their price quite well. Quite a few scams going about on places like ebay so beware of that. Also a lot of the cheaper chinese machines are pretty bad from what I have read on other forums
Other option depending what sort of skills you have is to manufacture one from scratch as Phill did or buy one that’s knackered & rebuild it as I did.
As well as the machine you may have software to buy to be able to use it which is another learning curve.
They take up quite a bit of space so you need to plan for that.

[Phill Fenton]

Yes it’s true – you really can build your own low cost machine that’s capable of producing accurate work. But you will need to invest some time in learning how to do it and following instructions from others that have written about it both in forums and in books. A good forum to look at is:-
http://www.buildyourtools.com
It really is a fascinating hobby and I guarantee you’ll be hooked once you start.

I’m currently working on a design for a new machine using all aluminium components for the chassis and gantry which should yield a big improvement over wooden or mdf home built versions.

However, not everyone would want to spend the time and effort building their own and good machines are available off the shelf from a number of manufacturers. A good quality second hand machine can probably be bought from about £5000 upwards

[Martin Pearson]

Phill, did you ever get the machine to cut acrylic ? Just that acrylic letters were mentioned in the original post.

[Phill Fenton]

Hi Martin

Yes it will cut acrylic. But a better (polished) finish can be achieved using a laser cutter.

[David Mitchell]

thanks guys, wonderful bunch on here 😛