[rpovey]

I was going to post this in the Novakon forum, but I thought people looking for machines might find this interesting, since I don't see much feedback on the Novakon machines.

About 6 months ago I decided to get a larger Mill, after reading through various threads here (notably Hoss') I ordered a G0704. After the second multi month delay I saw the NM145 was on clearance at Novakon. Now I actually have all of the parts for Hoss' G0704 conversion including ballscrews machined by CJ Masterworks, but the NM145 clearance price, and my irritation at Grizzly's inability to give me an accurate delivery date resulted in me canceling the G0704 and ordering the NM145.

My good luck with delivery delays continued, Novakon actually shipped a few days after their original estimate, then between thanksgiving, Customs delays, my being unavailable for a week and just the shipping company taking forever, it took over a month to ship from Canada to the US, finally arriving just before Xmas.

The crate was delivered at 6p.m. in the dark, was badly damaged, the palette having collapsed probably from a drop at some point in shipping, one side of the crate was barely hanging on, which made i relatively easy to tear the side off and do a quick inspection, there was no obvious sign of damage, so I accepted it.



I left the mill as it was in the crate until the following morning when I could get a friend to help get it out of the crate. Once it was out of the crate, I could inspect it more thoroughly.

While the bent bar that holds the homing switch triggers was trivially addressed.



The drop had caused the Power supply mounting board to shatter, unfortunately aso damaging some of the lines between the PSU board and the mounting board for the drivers.



Novakon are sending me a replacement board, but I was able to temporarily mount the broken board, and repair the damaged wires.

Getting it running from there would have been easy enough if the Mach3 xml file on Novakons site had been correct. However that xml file is for the old Gecko based hardware and it's almost entirely wrong, after a few emails, internet searches for driver data sheets, a couple of posts on the Novakon forum here and some time with a multimeter, I had it working.

In the mean time I also found this



Apparently it's common for this to be the case, there is nothing to protect the oil line when it hits the stop at the end of the X Axis it gets crushed. Novakon are sending me some replacement oil line, I'll put a slightly longer bolt in one of the ballnut mounts with a lock nut to provide a spacer to prevent it happening again. I'm also considering grinding a small amount out of the casting and actually running the oil line to the ball-nut, apparently newer casting already have relief for this.

My general impressions so far are very positive.
The wiring in the electrical cabinet is tidy and well thought out.
Running it's surprisingly quiet.
I really didn't spend any time trying to maximize rapid speeds, I'm running at 150IPM.
I just measured the X and Y backlash this morning at 0.0005 in Y and nothing in X, I'll take that.
It has the infamous sangmutan controller and a BLDC motor, so low end torque isn't a strong point, I had no issues though machining the incorrectly sized T-Nuts I had, and the majority of what I cut is AL where the 6000 RPM spindle speed is a nice plus.
It uses sealed magnetic Home switches, and I'm a little surprised that they don't provide 2 triggers per axis, so you could also treat them as limits, interestingly the drawings Novakon were nice enough to supply to me do show 2.
The cabinet base is pretty nice, and contains the coolant pump/reservoir.

I haven't done a lot of cutting yet, and I haven't run coolant through it yet, I'm leaving that until after I reassemble after replacing the crushed oil line.

I opted to provide my own PC and the way the breakout board fits in the cabinet, puts the parallel port connection very close to the side, putting unnecessary stress on the parallel port cable. I've put together a short parallel port ribbon cable extension and I'll run it to the side of the case.

[bogiestl]

The mill and stand were packed as a solid unit, or are they actually a single piece?

[ihavenofish]

The mill and stand were packed as a solid unit, or are they actually a single piece?

the stand is a separate steel piece, but they come pre assembled.

[rpovey]

As ihavenofish says, the stand is a separate unit, the coolant pump and reservoir are in the stand, so it comes pre assembled.

[lcvette]

nice Mill! have any pictures of it fully uncrated and setup?

PM Sent!

Chris