Greetings. I’ve owned a Laguna IQ CNC for a few weeks now, and I’m very happy. I’m a CNC novice, and in no way a professional woodworker. But after months of searching the web for information, I’ve been surprised at how little there is out there. This post, I hope, will be helpful to those like me, who just want a taste before diving in. What follows is an account of my own experience as a newbie. It does not purport to be professional advice. But I suspect there are many people out there in my shoes, people wanting to get into the CNC world, and wondering what lies in store. So here goes.
I got the bug to try a CNC many months ago. I have no desire to make quaint signs for boating clubs. I want to make art. My own designs. Everything from foam molds for ceramics to guitars to printed circuit boards, aluminum faceplates for electronic gear, wooden cases, picture frames, templates for old-school woodworkers, architectural details, etc. I wanted no limits – just a machine that could cut whatever I design – across a large spectrum of media and genres.
So I started investigating available CNC machines. It’s impossible to do this on the internet without running into the Router Bob videos. He’s good, and so I looked at Laguna. I also looked at all the usual suspects at the entry level – Laguna, Camaster, Shark, Shopbot, generic Chinese routers on ebay, you name it. First, I found that there is surprisingly little information out there. I’m used to the pro audio world, where you can find extensive posts on every subtle variation of obscure capacitors produced over the last 60 years. But CNC? Pretty sparse. And if you have a BS detector, you can tell pretty quickly that half of it is trolling by manufacturers. (For the record, I have no affiliation with any manufacturer. I’m a nerd hobbyist in Arizona with no axe to grind. Hell, I wouldn’t even know how to grind an axe.).
I don’t have the space or electrical service to support a 4x8 CNC. I needed something small. So the Laguna IQ looked like a pretty good deal for the price. I checked and checked, but found little in the way of independent reviews except for the Ernie Martinez posts on this forum. Not a pretty picture. But I soon realized that his posts reflected the experience of a novice coming to terms with a new world, not necessarily a bad machine. I am also such a novice, so I soldiered on.
I went with the IQ. First, the main internet criticism seems to be that they are “Chinese.” Well, so is the MacBook Pro I’m using to post this. I’m an American guy, and I want to make stuff right here in the good old US of A. But try to get through a day without using a Chinese product, and you’ll be living in a cave. There are metaphysical debates online about how much of the machine is assembled in the USA and how much is made in China. You know what? I don’t care. I wanted the best deal for the money. (Admit it, so do you.) And I’m not so jingoistic as to think that all Chinese stuff is crap and everything made in the USA works great. Ever drive an American car made in the 70s or 80s? My iPhone seems to be a pretty good piece of kit. And the Chinese make a lot of stuff. I figure they might be good at making machines that make stuff.
So what are the other factors? First, I was totally turned off by the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a CNC just so I could hose clamp a Porter Cable hand router to the business end. I wanted a real spindle, with real variable speed. More on that later. I liked the idea of a water cooled spindle (especially running out of a garage in Arizona). And Chinese or not, the welded frame, the sheer mass of the thing, the all-steel construction really appealed to me. Bottom line: I couldn’t find anything that offered close to these specs within thousands of dollars of the IQ, apart from sketchy ebay sales of generic Chinese routers by sellers who I knew would disappear minutes after I gave them my PayPal account.
So after much fretting, comparative shopping and due respect to Ernie, I placed my order for an IQ HHC in late December. The delivery time was always a little vague. I was hoping for the first week in February, but it never happened. The first week in March, the truck arrived.
During those months of anticipation, I had another choice to make: Software. Faced with the reality that all this stuff is made to run on Windows, I swallowed my pride and installed that sorry OS on a partition on my Apple. (In every other area of my life – professional writing, music production, photography – the best software is made for OSX. In the CNC world, the ONLY software is made for Windows. I guess that when the market is small, developers have to try to capture the biggest share of it, even if it’s on a dying, inferior platform). The Laguna doesn’t run on Windows – the controller loads GCode straight off a USB stick. I LOVE that. But you gotta design and toolpath on something. So I narrowed it down to Aspire or Rhino/RhinoCam. I downloaded demos of both.
Aspire seems like a great product. It’s incredibly intuitive. It’s user-friendly. It has great tutorials. But it’s $2,000. And the design features are seriously lacking. The entire presentation of the software is built around the aesthetic of a Kountry-Kitch’n sign company. So I tried Rhino. Rhino has the aesthetic I was looking for and all the user-friendliness of the guidance computer on Apollo 13. RhinoCam smacks of the Mercury project. But those guys went into space, slide rules and all. So I decided to climb the learning curve. It’s not over yet. But Rhino really can create anything, and I love that.
Rhino is completely impossible to grasp without training. I subscribed to Lynda.com, which has a pretty awesome Rhino 5 course. And I plunked down $1250 for RhinoCam, which got me a dongle. The most valuable USB stick I’ve ever owned, this thing is totally annoying. If you lose it, you’re out $1250. If you don’t have it plugged in at any single moment, look out. But such is life.
The simple fact is that I outgrew Aspire’s design capabilities within a few days of playing with the demo. I doubt I’ll ever truly master Rhino, but it can do anything I can imagine. Toolpathing in Aspire is so easy it’s fun. RhinoCam reminds me a bit of a DOS program. But it can do anything I need it to, if only I tell it EXACTLY what to do. Bottom line: Rhino is a lot less fun for a beginner, but you won’t outgrow it. Rhinocam is just plain time-consuming and frustrating for a novice. But it works inside Rhino, so at least the CAD and CAM are integrated. If money were no object, I’d try a Rhino/Aspire combo, but money is an object. At this point, I’m having a bit less fun than I would with Aspire, but I’m also really learning how to do this in a way that will let me make whatever I want in the future. Nothing worthwhile is easy…
Anyway, the truck arrived. Down it came off the liftgate, and the driver came with a pallet jack that got the crate into my garage. I had built a 48X60 table (which is actually barely large enough) out of 4x4s, 2x8s, double thickness OSB and a whole lot of ½ inch bolts. Ugly but solid. (I also made it 36 inches high – higher than most workbenches, but my back doesn’t get tired standing at the machine at this height). The question was how to get the machine up there? I thought about using 4 guys to just lift the thing, but the size of the table made me realize that it would be a trick even for 4 guys. Probably doable, but I really didn’t want to drop the thing. A rented Genie super lift, several 2x4s and 3 guys got the machine on the table with no stress or damage. Overkill? Perhaps, but this isn’t a refrigerator – it’s precision equipment.
It turns out that I got one of the new IQs – the only picture of it that I know of at this writing is on Router Bob’s Les Paul video. There are some differences between this one and the one I thought I ordered – all of them good. First, the electrical box is meant to be placed on the table, rather than on the floor. It has a speed control that allows variations in 60 RPM increments from 6000-24000 RPM. All the wiring was in place, except for the plug. While waiting for delivery, I wired 240/20A into the garage, and had the right plug ready to go. Second, the stepper motors are covered on the new unit – certainly looks better. Third, those stepper motors have a pulse equivalence of 320, rather than the 160 on the old IQ. Finer control – yay! Fourth, they say it’s faster and stronger than the old IQ. I believe it – I’ve mistakenly put those motors through some torture, and they never lose a step. Fifth, the touch-off puck is different. It doesn’t attach magnetically to the machine, and you have to plug it in every time you use it. Oh well. The last difference I can think of is the dust hood – it uses a 4” hose, and has a door that lets you change tools without removing the whole hood. Cool.
Everything about the machine was perfect when it arrived. The only issue I had was a leak in the water hose to the motor, which was fixed in a few seconds by tightening the nut. So far so good. (Living in Arizona, I filled the bucket with distilled water).
The toolbox that comes with the machine includes several collets and bits. Most of the bits are pretty weird – shapes I don’t expect to use. All are proudly labeled in Chinese. But there are some useful ones, including a 1.125 carbide flycutter. I bought the Laguna introductory bit set, which helped somewhat. But I was quickly online buying a bunch of bits for what I thought I needed.
So there it is. Glistening on the table. What to do now?
Well, the documentation that comes with the machine is very weak. There’s essentially nothing on the HHC controller, except the very basics. As in the setup video, there is the Laguna Tools sign cut into melamine. I flipped the board over, clamped it down, and inserted a ¼ endmill. I found the program, pressed the green button, and it ran like a champ. But wait…the depth of the carving seemed shallower, and some of the detail of the letters just wasn’t there. I never found the answer to this mystery. I have no idea if the program I had was identical to the one they had at Laguna, and no idea if I was using an identical bit. After weeks of using the machine, I can say there’s nothing wrong with it. So I moved on. I started making my own designs, which involved 2d and 3d machining. Wow! The precision of the machine was flawless. I was producing parts that felt like they had been sanded smooth.
Not that it was quite that easy. I made plenty of rookie mistakes along the way. The machine does EXACTLY what you tell it to. You don’t just say “make this.” Each toolpath needs to be double checked to make sure the right regions are selected, the speeds are correct, and above all, the cut levels are properly specified. Regions in Rhino can be curves, surfaces or surface edges. RhinoCam doesn’t like these equally, and it takes trial and error to know which to use for each toolpath type. It turns out that 2D machining is harder than 3D in RhinoCam. The software has tons of options, and is really very flexible. But you’d better know what each of the numbers in each of the various tabs means or you’re going to waste a lot of material. The model, coordinate system, stock alignment and work zero all need to be exactly right. 3D machining is pretty cool (and RhinoCam gives you many more options than Aspire). But you have to check the software. I had a frustrating experience for 2 days in which a program kept crashing the controller halfway through. The culprit? RhinoCam had computed the top Z movement at a little more that a hundered-millionth of an inch. The controller (understandably) couldn’t get that through its head. I changed that number to zero, and all was well.
Next was feeds and speeds. As a guy who had used a hand held router, my instinct said “get it turning pretty fast and move gently (slowly) through the material.” Wrong. It turns out that few tools can handle the high RPM the spindle can produce at any feed rate within the machine’s capabilities. After some trial and error, I find the machine has no trouble doing 125 IPM through hard wood, but it takes an RPM down to 120000-16000 to keep the tool happy. Ideally (according to the calculator) the feed rate would be much higher, but I haven’t pushed the machine that hard yet.
A word about Laguna itself. I read some scary rants on the internet by anonymous posters. My experience has been awesome. These people genuinely support their products. Pretty amazing considering that the machine only cost me $5500. They’ve literally spent hours on the phone with me – apart from the Router Bob training session. Why hours on the phone? Because I didn’t know what I was doing – not because there was a problem with the machine. Almost all of that time was devoted to learning the HHC. As I noted earlier, the documentation is terrible. A better manual, and I wouldn’t have been so dependent. But they stepped up and helped me. I now feel pretty competent with the thing. (Note – I found it helpful to adjust the table size on the controller. I shaved the X axis from 610 to 609, and bumped the Y axis from 1000 to 1025). For genuine customer care in this age of impersonal relations and cost-cutting, I have to give Laguna an A+.
This has been a long review. It hasn’t been easy to gain competence. But not one of my issues has been with the IQ. It delivers everything they promise, and I’m very happy with the purchase.
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Originally Posted by Art Mann
I hope the Laguna IQ keeps you happy for years to come. I researched CNC’s a couple of years ago and agree that the amount of information available is frustratingly sparse. I felt strongly after my research that I had made the right CNC choice but it was still a leap of faith.
