****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
#1: Yes, its covered in grease. Just like every new piece of machinery (which is what this is) it is absolutely slathered in grease so that it can travel across an ocean, in a shipping container, thru warehouses, and arrive at your door step with no rust. Buy a rag and get over it.#2: Yes, it needs a ton of adjustment to set up. Just like every new piece of machinery it needs to be calibrated, adjusted, shimmed, cinched down, checked, readjusted, and set up for the materials you intend to process. If you don't own a set of shim gauges or don't even know what those are then do not buy this. If you've never used or adjusted a full size slip roll, shear, or press brake this machine is going to seem like it has no adjustments. That is false. It has tons of adjustments. In fact they're all over the place, but you have to know what you're doing. You need to shim the gap on the shear blades, I went with .006" for 20ga. You need to square the guide. You need to adjust and lock in the shear blade itself to remove slop. You need to adjust the spring clamp. You have to pressure set the press brake dies, then tighten them down. You have to set the depth of the dies to acheive the bend angle you want for the material you're going to use. If you change material thickness you're going to have to readjust, just like any press brake. You have to shim the two main slip rolls... this is all normal stuff folks. Everything you would do to a 60 ton press brake, a 12ft shear, or a full size plate roll you will need to do here. If you dont know how to do that stuff don't buy it and leave a 1 star review just because it wasn't as easy as using a toaster. This isnt a tool, this isn't a easy bake oven, its a metal processing machine... Actually its three metal processing machines. I took me literally 4 hours to get everything dialed in exactly where I wanted and to be honest thats exactly what I was anticipating given the capability of this machine.#3: once it is set up and dialed in this thing works surprisingly well for the price. We're talking perfect bends, clean cuts, and straight rolls. Its a wonderful machine for folks who know how to use it and what its designed for. I'm going to use this a ton for stuff around the house. Brackets, boxes, dividers, trays, organizers, clips, etc. I have it set up for 20ga steel and for once a company didn't overstate the machine's capability. It will absolutely shear, brake, and roll 8" of 20ga mild steel all day. You can even go up to 16ga if you're willing to choke the width down to 4".#4: the backset stop does suck. Its useless. Its impossible to get accurate and its flimsy. I dont care, I would never rely on a backset stop for a machine this small. Its about my only complaint other than the weird lead bearings on the main top roll which should be swapped for 3/8" steel pipe. fortunately i had some, one is ~1/2" long, the other is about ~1/4" long, it took all of 1 minute to cut two slivers of pipe, problem solved.#5: getting it mounted down is an issue. They put the front mounting holes in an inaccessible location so you'll either need to clamp it to the end of a table or weld some extensions on the feet that you can drill an anchoring hole thru. I went with clamps and it works fine, I want to be able to put it away.#6: instead of hot gluing a popsicle stick to hold the slip roll cover from banging against the frame like some other reviewer did, JUST TAKE IT OFF! Lol. The cover is removable... On purpose... Because you need it off to slip roll... It literally just unclips off the pins.DO NOT BUY THIS IF YOU'RE A HOBBIEST OR SOME DUDE WHO'S GONNA "START A LITTLE HOME BUSINESS". You're going to be mad and you're going to leave a bad review because they didn't give you a cute little manual that explains how to process sheet metal in your garage. Don't be that guy. This is not a toy, its a surprisingly well designed, compact, sturdy sheet metal processing machine for people who've already used full size versions of these machines and enjoy being able to fabricate small parts quickly. Its not a machine to learn on. I love it and I think it is absolutely worth the money. Its crazy all the things you can do with something this small and lightweight.
