Author: Andy Lee

Due to some updated classification on the LongMill and certain products that we make, orders that were placed after June 2nd may have had reduced duties and taxes on their orders. We’ve changed orders placed (not shipped) after June 2nd to a DDP or DAP status (Delivery Duty Paid or Delivery at Place), which means that any brokerage, duties, and taxes were paid by us.

We let customers know that there may be duties and tariffs at checkout, on our shipping page, and in our emails that are sent out before orders get shipped because we want them to be prepared for them when or if the bill comes. However, many folks don’t read everything, so we’ve had to work with some customers who’ve accused us of not letting them know, which is why we’ve been looking into ways to take over the tax-paying process ourselves.

At this time we are in the process of making sure the system and communication to UPS is working so that we don’t have any unexpected surprises, but so far over the last few weeks, we haven’t seen any customers needing to pay for duties and taxes on their orders.

Duties and Taxes to the US and USMCA

One of the major confusions with our American customers has been in navigating duties and taxes on their orders. According to one of the tax calculation agents we reached out to about figuring out duties and taxes, one of the reasons that Americans aren’t familiar with duties and taxes is because the US has one of the highest de-minimis values in the world and most customers never have been charged. That means that most shipments entering the US with a value lower than $800USD do not get charged duties and taxes, and shipments above $800USD will be assessed for duties and taxes at the border.

There is a trade agreement called the USMCA (an updated version of NAFTA) which provides preferential tariffs on certain items that fall under certain categorizations. Because the majority of parts and materials come from Canada and within North America, the LongMill, with the proper self-certification, is allowed a preferential tariff treatment of 0%. This means that when the LongMill ships from Canada to the US, the LongMill won’t have a tariff.

Without USMCA, duties and taxes rates on all the products we currently sell are between 2.9 and 3%. So if your order was valued at $1800USD, then you’d pay roughly $54USD plus $20-$40ish in brokerage fees. However, now that we have certified the LongMill with USMCA, duties won’t apply.

Brokerage

While we may not have to pay duties and taxes on the LongMill, we do still need to pay a brokerage, or entry preparation fee. This means that UPS charges a fee to submit and do the paperwork to clear the LongMill for entry. We’ve worked with UPS to apply a discount on the brokerage fees, so that these fees should be around 40-50% lower than before. Originally, brokerage fees accounted for around $25-40 per order, but now should be around $12-20 instead.

For the time being, we have been absorbing these fees and paying them on behalf of the customer. We’re still deciding if we should pass them along to the customer in the future, but it seems likely that we’ll continue to pay for them as they are a minor cost overall of the machine.

What does it mean for you?

Well, for the time being, it means that you probably won’t get billed duties and taxes when ordering a LongMill from us anymore. Thus:

• Saving around $75-120 per order in duties and taxes
• Slightly faster shipping times to the US with streamlined clearance

In a way, this is a post to let people know that this transition is happening and to answer people’s confusion on why they haven’t been getting any bills for the last few weeks from UPS.

We’re not making any promises that new orders won’t have duties and taxes that you’ll have to pay. We’re also not making promises or saying that if you got a bill for duties and taxes at any point that we’ll pay them for you. But, over the last few weeks, we’ve updated on our customs documentation to bill all duties, taxes, and brokerage fees to us and it appears on our side that they haven’t been sent to the customer.

If you placed an order after June 2nd and still got a bill, please let us know so we can make sure our system is working correctly.

We are at an exciting milestone, all of the components for the LongMill 48×30 and Extension Kits are now here. This means that we’ll be shipping out machines very soon. At this current time, I am expecting to start shipping a small number of kits between the end of next week and the end of the month. Once we have finalized some of the details for production and shipping, I’ll update our spreadsheet on the Order Status page on which week you should expect to have your machine shipped. Currently, we are wrapping up documentation and resources for the kits and are working on final packing for everything.

A big chunk of pre-packing for current customers on the waiting list is complete, but there is still a lot of stuff to get packed. Here’s a general plan on how things will go:

1. We will send out the first batch of machines (20-30 units) to the first set of customers and give ourselves a few days to hear back if there are any issues.
2. If we don’t run into any issues at this time, we’ll continue to ramp up shipping until all of the orders have been filled.

From our previous experience, we’re able to ramp up to about 80-100 machines per week, which means that there should be plenty of time for July orders to get shipped.

There are a couple of new things that come with this new version of the machine which will be new challenges for us including:

1. Now that the 48×30 machines come in two separate packages, handling the tracking, logistics, and customs for these orders
2. The weight and size of the new packages, as well as making sure we have adequate packaging
3. Effectiveness of communication on having three possible variations to assembling the Extension Kits

What you should know if you have LongMill 48x30s and Extension Kit on order

First, customers should know that LongMill 48×30 machines come in two separate shipments. We cannot predict if the shipments will come separately or together, so if you get one, you’ll have to wait for the second one to arrive. We’ll provide tracking for both, but since this is a new process and system for us, please have patience as we do our best to automate the processes and keep everything organized.

Second, Extension Kit orders will come as one long box and has everything inside to extend your kit.

If you have a LaserBeam on order, we’ve automatically shipped longer cables with your machine to make sure that it’ll fit in the bigger machine.

New orders for LongMill 48x30s and Extension Kits

We currently have enough stock to make around 200 48x30s and Extension Kits. Once this stock is depleted, it’s likely that we’ll have to update our lead times as we’ve allocated only 200 of the 60-inch long X rails at this time. Currently, we are sitting at around 140 orders. We’re working on making a new batch of extrusions, but it’s likely to take about 4-6 weeks to have another batch of rails arrive. Unless you are one of the next 50-60 customers on the list, please expect slightly longer lead times for future orders.

Hey everyone, please meet Andy McTaggart, one of our beta testers for the LongMill MK2 30×30.

About the beta testing program

Just as a quick intro about the beta testing program, at the end of last year, we recruited three different people of different backgrounds and skill levels in our area to test the LongMill MK2. At this point, we were at the final stages of our development for the MK2 and were looking to iron out the rest of the kinks to finalize the production of a few of the parts. All beta testers paid for their machines, albeit with a small discount. Each beta tester volunteered their time and space to observe and interview them at each step of the process as well as testing prototype and production parts as they were made to update their machines.

Working with Andy

One of the funny things about Andy having the LongMill was that he had done quite a lot of projects, but his family had been taking so many of them he only had a few projects on hand to show. I guess it’s sort of a good thing because it means that over the last few months of owning the machine, he’d been able to get up to that level of caliber. It was at least great to see some of the photos of the projects, however!

I thought it was also funny that although we gave Andy all of the new production parts, he’d just ended up using the old prototype parts, minus the XZ gantry which has the holes for the new dust shoe. This includes the 3D printed Z-axis motor mount which we switched to aluminum. Even still, the machine was chugging along totally fine.

I guess this speaks to some extent on how far we’ve come with mechanical design. Previously on the LongMill MK1, we made a lot of changes to the design of the MK1 before finalizing it for production. For example, the MK1 beta testers, instead of getting drag chains, got foam pipe insulation for wiring management, since haven’t even figured out how to use drag chains properly. In comparison, there were only minor changes from prototype to production in the MK2 machines.

Is it time for us to support spindles?

The one really big thing that I noticed from his demo project was that when using the ball end router bit for the tray, his Makita would noticeably slow down. We had the router speed set to full RPMs and while the LongMill itself chugged along like a tank, I saw the router be the bottleneck.

Because most of the projects I’ve been doing myself have been mostly with 1/4″ and 1/8″ bits, I hadn’t really run into the Makita router as a bottleneck, but in some types of projects, such as surfacing and using router bits, it seems more apparent that the LongMill MK2’s rigidity is more than enough to handle more power.

Originally we’ve recommended our users to stay away from spindles, and we had a few reasons for that.

First is from necessity, as we didn’t really see much benefit from using a spindle when the Makita was powerful enough, and we felt it was not worth spending an extra few hundred dollars on it.

The second was complexity. Given that most of our customers are beginners with little to no electrical experience, and given that from our experience, programming and wiring VFDs can not only be complicated but also dangerous, we didn’t want customers to jump into it without some CNC experience first. It’s also quite difficult to purchase the right spindle and VFD. As someone who’s ordered, programmed, and tested a couple of different low-cost spindles, oftentimes I’ve found that there is basically no support and the wiring inside is many times not made to a safe specification. Also, I’ve had a few VFDs also break and stop working as well, and of course, it’s difficult to get support on those as well. I’ve yet to try some name-brand VFDs, but given that they can be a lot more expensive, I feel that they may be out of budget for most of our customers.

And lastly, because the mechanical structure was one of the limiting factors of the machine, the machine itself would not be able to take advantage of the spindle’s potential.

In truth, we have actually wired and tested spindles on the LongMill MK1 and have overall been able to use them. I’ve found that although they are much bigger and chunkier than a regular Makita, they will run on stock settings.

Now with the updated, full metal Z-axis design, as well as the overall redesign of the rails, the mechanical structure of the machine is no longer the bottleneck in performance. I’ve started doing some testing on the machine to see how the machine would behave using a spindle. And also as part of the design process for the MK2, we made sure that there would be enough clearance for standard-size spindles as well.

Also, now that we have a bigger community of companies that cater to the CNC community, we’ve seen spindle kits come on the market that I feel are better set up for this type of application. The spindle kits are also coming from companies that have a better reputation for quality control and support, which makes me feel more comfortable in regards to people trying to use spindles for the first time.

Given that we have the AltMill in development, which will most certainly need a spindle, I think it is a good time for us to revisit supporting 3 phase spindles again. I think it will take a long time for us to find a high-quality source for spindles and VFDs and create the right documentation and resources to provide the right amount of support, but given general interest from the community, we feel that we’ll have a lot of interested people.

So just as a basic test, here is the LongMill hefting a 80mm spindle weighing about 10lbs for reference.

In this test, we run the spindle up and down for about 3 hours at 7000mm/min, which is a lot faster than the 3000mm/min default on most LongMills.

Hey everyone, just a small update. We now have LightBurn software available on our store!

For those who aren’t familiar, LightBurn is a laser cutter control and design software that we’ve been using extensively with our LaserBeam laser system for the LongMill and our own CO2 laser we use for production.

If you have a LaserBeam or are thinking of getting one, we recommend checking out LightBurn software as this software is fully compatible with running and controlling your laser.

Hey everyone. Over the last couple of months, we’ve had some of our customers report having resonance and vibration issues on their LongMill MK2s. We’ve spent some time investigating this issue and have identified one area to help reduce resonance and vibration.

Going forward, we have been tuning the drivers on the drivers individually before shipping to eliminate customers from running into this issue, but some customers who received their machines earlier in the batch between March and May 2022 may want to consider looking at their current settings only if they have resonance issues.

If this is an issue you have, you’ll likely experience some vibration at a feedrate around 3700mm/min to 4000mm/min on the X and Y axis. Before you change your current settings, make sure your Delrin nuts and v-wheels are properly tensioned, as this can affect what sort of vibration you might be getting with your machine. You can learn more about changing current settings on each driver in our Resources.

If you are not experiencing any issues, we recommend keeping everything as they are. These issues do not apply to the majority of users. We’ve decided to present them as a way to share different areas of the engineering and design that goes into our products and things that we are working on to continually make improvements.

The technical stuff

We’ve determined that one of the reasons for vibration is caused by something called “mid-frequency resonance”. In simple terms, when the vibration created by the motor as it rotates matches the resonant frequency of the motor itself or the things that it is attached to, the vibrations build upon each other.

To talk more about the vibrations coming from the motors, it’s important to understand on how a stepper motor works. The video below does a pretty good job in explaining how it works.

As the video describes, by alternating the coils that are energized, we can move the rotor at different speeds and directions.

Once we start to move the motor faster and faster, the rotor will undershoot or overshoot it’s position causing the motor to vibrate as it springs back and forth between the positions we need the motor to be. Having slightly more current than needed can cause the motor to under or overshoot its position based on how well the coil can control its inertia. Having too much current can cause the rotor to completely overshoot its position, and having too little current can cause the motor to not find its position at all, causing a stalling situation.

In any case, we want to find a balance in the current setting that allows us to have smooth and consistent movement within the range of speed required for the application. Based on our testing, we’ve found that running between 1.8A to 2A on the X and Y drivers balance resonance and provide more than enough torque through the whole range of operating speeds on the LongMill.

Thankfully, it is fairly easy to adjust the current on the motor by using the blue potentiometer on the driver.

While we were doing the testing, one hypothesis was that the accuracy of the potentiometer as well as the actual current setting silkscreen around the potentiometer was not correct or had variance, but we actually found that the levels around the dial were fairly accurate and consistent.

We believe that we didn’t see this issue on the MK1 machines because the plastic that the motors were attached to offered more damping than the MK2, which rigidly connects everything with metal. However with the new MK2 design being a more rigid system overall, the effects of vibration have a bigger impact on the machine as well. The overall mass and resonant frequencies, as well as the resistance of the machine’s components, such as from the Delrin nuts and v-wheels can create additional dampening.

We also believe that there are some very small electronic differences between batches and controllers overall, which may cause more vibration in one driver than another.

Also, we’ve found that stalling due to resonance often requires the machine to travel beyond the max feedrate default of 4000mm/min.

In cases where people are experiencing resonance, we suspect that:

• Their current settings are set high (2.5A+)
• The machine is running at the max speed
• Components of the machine are loose

We also think that our recommendations of tightening some of the components have eliminated mild to medium resonance and vibration issues, which leaves us with users that need to adjust their current settings.

Future developments

The drivers that we use, Toshiba TB6600 chips, are simple, inexpensive, have plenty of power, and are widely available, making it a good option for CNC applications where a balance in affordability and power are important. However, modern stepper drivers can now integrate additional technology that can improve the performance of the stepper motor by having a finer control in modifying the way current flows in and out of the stepper motor have been coming down in price over the last few years.

We are continuing to explore improving the performance of the machine in this area through continual research and testing, including testing new driver systems and motor technologies.

In future development, if we want to enhance the performance of the LongMill, exploring different stepper driver options is a great option. This should help us drive the machine faster and more efficiently without requiring more power.

One of the things that I admire about Ed is his focus, commitment, and passion for delving into the technical side of the things that he does, and the LongMill was no exception. Please meet Ed, our second beta tester for the LongMill MK2.

About the beta testing program

Just as a quick intro about the beta testing program, at the end of last year, we recruited three different people of different backgrounds and skill levels in our area to test the LongMill MK2. At this point, we were at the final stages of our development for the MK2 and were looking to iron out the rest of the kinks to finalize the production of a few of the parts. All beta testers paid for their machines, albeit with a small discount. Each beta tester volunteered their time and space to observe and interview them at each step of the process as well as testing prototype and production parts as they were made to update their machines.

Working with Ed

It was fantastic to work with Ed in the beta testing program. Especially during the early stages of testing, he provided us with lots of thoughts and feedback on the engineering design, especially in terms of improving the accuracy of the machine with regard to the process of setting it up and assembling.

Just to give some context, here’s a photo of his first project (https://forum.sienci.com/t/first-project-needlessly-complicated-torsion-box/4791/4):

It should be pointed out that Ed:

• Did this project in Fusion 360, which I personally consider one of the most advanced hobby CNC software available
• This project also includes tiling, which is also a fairly advanced technique, especially because it requires a lot of thought to position the material when the dimensions of each component matter.
• Requires parts to slot together accurately, and to do that, Ed took the time to make dozens of test boards to find the perfect fit, each marked down with the measurement, settings, and bit size.
• Made all of the parts with the machine supported by rickety saw horses, not a stable base as we typically recommend our customers to use.

This project gave some additional perspective on the limitations and possibilities of how accurate the machine can be, and what sort of things we can do to improve the accuracy overall, especially for technically challenging projects.

It is wonderful to continue to see Ed work on technically challenging projects and see how capable the LongMill can be in the hands of someone so technically capable. I also admire his drive to jump straight into the deep end in terms of what a CNC machine can do and come out with some amazing projects and knowledge to share. If you want to see some of his other projects, make sure to check them out on the Forum.