Don't Buy junk stuff!

Only one way to know for sure!

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I haven’t been buying from Ali lately because its almost more expensive in shipping charges than on Amazon at normal prices and the 3 month shipping times!

About two year ago I noticed that many of these ender or 3d printer parts were the exact same parts on Ali, Banggood, Amazon, Walmart.com, ebay, and other smaller sites. I knew that the manufacturing wasn’t great but I also knew there was a large gap in price between junk, just good or great.
Example: those little aluminum Pulleys seem to be made in the same place. But Ali used to sell them for pennies (40-60 cents) while everyone else were selling the exact pulleys for bucks ($5-9). The quality was junk and it was sold everywhere. I could buy 20 of them for about $5 and I would have enough for other projects. Now after the grub screws were replaced the pulleys were better than before. Or I could buy a legit McMaster Carr pulley for $30-60 each, which I did at work for the Modix. Nice pulleys but it gets pricy quickly!

So the trade off is finding parts that are just ok good that can do the job and are not pure junk. But some parts you can NOT skimp on. I would say the Extruder is one of them. I also bought junk extruders for my 3d printer builds and found them worthless. Now I am afraid to try anything other than an E3D Extruder. I trust them and I have LOTS of them at work and home.
We are on a CNC site and the spindle is the same as the extruder for what the machine does. I have heard many people buying those 300w spindles. Which I really like the ability to control the speed on the CNC software. However, they have many problems unless you can dial them in and they cost as much as a router. In the CNC world that is junk! Even some of these 800w air cooled spindles are junk. It also adds a new level of complexity to the machine to get the control board to talk to the spindle as well as powering the 220w inverter box. Then there are a number of junk items in there that can cause huge problems that are hard to diagnose.
I would have bought the Dewalt router that is for the LR2 but I had a Bosch cult and it has been reliable. I also have the Bosch 1617 and that would be sweet to put on the LR if i could get it to fit.

As for cheap Ali parts, I wouldn’t buy one of those Makita clones personally but the pulleys I would still buy. I bought “gates” clone belt and thought that was good too. LOL The BELT i got from V1 vs Ali is crazy!!! Ali has plastic belts like a 3d printers belts and V1 has stinky rubber belts like something you would see in an engine. The bearings… Amazon sells china brand. The problem on Ali is finding the correct bearings Amazon buys.

All in all, the kit from V1 is the way to go even if you have most of the parts already. It was a hard lesson to learn. Ryan has done all this work for us… so we don’t have to. :grin:

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