I am very close to pulling the trigger on a G.Weike LG900N machine primarily based on the positive posts that I read here as well as the G. Weike staff's willingness to help resolve any issues that come up. The price seems quite reasonable given my budget is right around $5k. There are a few things I am struggling with so I thought I'd ask the community...
The difference between 60W and 80W is fairly significant relative to my budget (~$600). How much will I regret not having this extra 20W if I plan to use the machine for cutting acrylic (1/2" max), hardwood (1/4"), acetal (1/4") and various other thin material (gasket, mylar, kapton, etc). I don't plan on doing a lot of engraving with this machine.
I have decided on a few add-ons such as red dot positioning, auto focus and a chiller. However, I've read in a few posts that the auto focus feature is easily broken. Is it worth the money to add this feature or is manually focusing the beam tolerable? Note, this machine is more of a R&D toy and not something that will be running 100% of the time. So, extra setup time (if it's minimal) would not be so painful.
They sell a filter for the system at $500 which seems very pricey. I am pretty resourceful and I am guessing that I could easily make something to serve this purpose for roughly 10% of that cost.
Finally, it is extra for the USB option. Can anybody comment on the differences between USB and the PCI card? I'd love to eventually run this from Linux using EMC2 and it seems like the PCI card would actually be beneficial in this case (or maybe not).