OK. At least they finally responded to you, Pavel. Here’s hoping they keep to their words.
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I wonder if the issue they’ve solved is the failing linear modules.
Hard to tell how widespread it is. That seems to be the only consistent problem lately.
There’s the occasional warped print sheet or untapped screw type issue.
I’ve ordered parts from a couple other chinese places. Not sure where they’re coming from but small packets shipped quickly. Larger items took a week or two even start tracking after saying shipped. Shipping still pretty messed up in some places.
-S
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Hi S. I don’t think there is any point in speculating on the issue which team Snapmaker claim to have solved, especially when just communicating with customers seems to be so problematic. Twice I had to reference Snapmaker staff who were senior people in the company before anybody contacted @Freimor. Hiding behind an impenetrable wall of silence is wrong. If there is a problem with parts please tell us! If the problem is with shipping, then tell us! If the problem is a manufacturing fault, just tell us!
Reliability… initially this may not be very high on the radar of Kickstarter customers but eventually… the question has to be raised; as in Pavel’s case. Surely some executive level staff member at team Snapmaker can see how it damages their reputation. Snapmaker want to be seen as an honourable company, who will deliver on all of their promises. The non communication is incredibly harmful to that reputation.
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May be no point but that’s what we do when we have incomplete information.
Obviously there are serious problems with how they’re handling this.
None of us knows what the corporate structure is and what level the people are at that we’re dealing with directly and what they’ve been instructed to do or say. I’ve worked at plenty of places where the upper management was idiots and us lower level people were stuck dealing with the brunt of their incompetence. Again speculation. Please don’t take any of this as me thinking that SM as a company should be let off the hook.
They did just finally post something to FB, so that’s a small start:
-S
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It would be helpful if the company made posts like that on the forum here as well.
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Hmmm… the principle staff of the company not posting to the forum where they are (officially?) supposed to support their purchasers? I don’t get it. I was using Facebook until Facebook had written to me using a name that was obviously Chinese and asked me if that was my own account under a pseudonym. Having had my account of several years hacked into on facebook, I do not and will not use it now. I also cancelled my linked-in professional healthcare supplier account and my twitter account. I had this forum as my only contact point for Snapmaker related issues. I was pointed here by the sales agent when I had first needed support and I was assured that this forum was the official support avenue.
As customers, it is not up to us to try and understand the ins and outs of the corporate structure of any company whom we choose to grace with our business. Nor should we ever be expected to care. As a customer, I don’t care about how the Snapmaker company is arranged or staffed. When I bought SM1, I was merely buying a machine that I thought would suit my purposes. I was not buying into a lifetime’s history of the Snapmaker company. I don’t expect to be asked to understand its difficulties either because I do not sit on the board… its troubles with manufacturing and staffing are clearly not my responsibility and neither can I bring about any resolution.
To press, I keep seeing (the same tired) excuses from Snapmaker. To my mind the letter from @Rainie is just more excuses and they are not even addressed to the official forum. Too little, too late. And it goes without saying… more of the same. This from a company in a country that is the most populous in the world. I don’t believe they cannot employ enough people of the appropriate skill level.
My external view is that the company has a fundamental supply chain issue. How many people purchased a SM2 machine? Since the Kickstarter amount was reached are you seriously telling me that lets say… 10,000 machines was far too difficult to produce? The rails, whether X, Y or Z are based upon a common profile. That profile could be chopped to size in a relatively short time. Having worked in production engineering when I was much younger, I estimate that it is within the bounds of reason to expect a number in the region of 1,000 rails of whatever designation to be produced in 8 hours.
The stepper motors are produced by another manufacturer and it is an assembly issue. Controller boards can be created on a PCB machine by the hundreds. Releasing machines that have serious faults is likely to slow production but production managers are responsible for testing and QA. How did QA release what is effectively a machine that is not fully functional? As for the software… don’t even go there. It has been pointed out numerous times how limiting, non functional and limited it is.
For me, the Snapmaker story is that they are a victim of their own success. Sales numbers are not the only measure of success. Repeat customers and happy customers are two measures of success that don’t yet seem to appeal to Snapmaker. I am really sad to be leaving but happy that I made a good decision while my SM1 was worth something to someone else. I lost quite a bit of money but it was not as a Kickstarter gambler… it was because I was really unaware of what was out there. The Snapmaker advertising looked attractive and my own selection bias kicked in. My due diligence was not far reaching enough.
Snapmaker cannot be held responsible for my own stupidity. I have become aware that I was flogging a dead horse as we say in the UK. The idiom just means that I was persisting in supporting Snapmaker long past the point where there was any use in doing so.
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I have reached that point as well @jepho, I’m strongly considering selling my SM2 and building a MPCNC instead. If I do it right I can get a larger work area, better support, and still save money(even after the resale loss) im just tired of all the silence, and excuses.
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Hello Adam. It appears to be the case that everyone I see on this board has made allowances over and above what would have been made for companies that are more familiar to us. Snapmaker have had a very fair opportunity to get Customer Service and their QA for New Hardware Failures and Luban and their control Software functional without errors. It is really tough (and I feel more than a little insulting) to see yet more excuses like those which were posted by @Rainie to Facebook. Snapmaker are are not addressing anything with these notices. The customers are caught because they have no other choice but to conclude that Snapmaker has no intention to put things right. This is concerning because it means nothing is being done about the three specific frontiers which I have delineated in bold font above.
Taking a hit now is far more preferable when trying to sell a machine. If it became widely understood that the Snapmaker company have no interest once they have your money, the value in the machines would fall. I am working on the basis that half of something is better than all of nothing. My SM1 buyer was very happy and understood that they were buying into a system that could not be made to work on items bigger than 130mm square for 3D printing and Laser work and 90mm square for CNC.
He accepted those limitations but was pleased with the 1170 x 40mm square wooden cubes, my three special working jigs, my new M4 drilled T6 aluminium table and clamps. He was really pleased with the extensive selection of 1/8th endmills and the enclosure. In all, the lucky buyer secured for himself a value of around £1845 for a mere £750. It’s only money in the end but I got some skill, experience and fun out of it. I will not attempt to put a price on those very valuable commodities.
I had never wanted to get to this point but felt driven to it by seeing issue after repeated issue not being addressed and just more excuses. The recent long absence of support was putting the tin lid on it as far as I was concerned. (idiom meaning it was too much, the absolute limit, the straw that broke the camel’s back). It is a great pity and a sadness to me because I felt this forum was a great place. The general support that users gave to each other was really heartwarming. In the final analysis the users could never compensate for the almost complete lack of Snapmaker staff interest.
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What do you think about this “Unfortunately, another challenge arose in late September. It took us sometime to figure out what was going on and how many users are affected”
How many users are affected? That means they could have sent some faulty machine?
Would have?
Search in the forum for broken linear modules. 
Yes, look at the other posts. Many recently arrived machines have a problem with the linear module.
@staff I received my unit at the start of September. Although everything is working well at the moment, I am concerned that I may fall into the bad batch.
Are there any serial numbers or date ranges we can check?
Figures of affected users will fall under the general heading of commercially sensitive material so it will never be known outside of the company. What this indicates is that Snapmaker are not in charge of their own manufacturing processes and the outsourced processes are not being stringently tested. In-house QA processes catch this sort of issue before it affects whole batches of machines. QA is not an end of manufacturing procedure… it is a continuous process that is applied at every stage of manufacture. The tolerances are known and every process has to fit within them.
They haven’t given any serial # info and no-one seems to have specifically been contacted as of yet - no type of recall. It sounds like a supplier wide problem, not just a few within that supplier - but that’s just speculation.
Most people with this problem seem to be having it fairly soon after receiving. So you’re probably good.
Go ahead and print away. If it does fail, they’ll send you a new linear module.
Hopefully soon they (or people on this board) will have a procedure to check if you have one or more of the defective modules.
-S
Just make sure you mark your x,y&z axis if you take your printer apart… from what I have seen issues arise when a “good” module is paired with a “bad” module on the y or z axis… 2 “bad” modules in the y axis will work fine.
Atom, You might look at the OpenBuilds CNC kits. Their prices are reasonable and the machines are solid.
Yeah I have seen those, but aluminum extrusion is soooo expensive here… it will cost me 2x the cost of SM to build it 
Hi all, sorry about the long wait. @Freimor I just sent you a PM regarding your case and please check your email for our follow-up. Thank you for your kind patience.
-Kai
Please review the traffic on the support forums for the last 3 weeks.
“Sorry about the long wait” is not going to cut it. Many people have waited weeks for replies, many still have not gotten any.
I was taught that “Sorry” is meaningless, without “I understand that what I did was problematic for you, and here’s how I’m going to keep it from happening again.”
SnapMaker needs to understand just how poorly they’re treating their customers (to the point of some people leaving the community, brand new users talking of selling their machines, people who haven’t received their machines getting anxious that they’ve made a mistake, people who received their machines worried theirs is in a ‘bad batch’…).
You need to make SERIOUS, DRASTIC, IMMEDIATE improvements to your customer service.
Your first step is a guaranteed 24 hours maximum response time for any email or post in which a staff member is tagged.
That’s the bare minimum, IMO.
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I totally agree with gamemaker.
I’m newbie and I’ve checked my A150 pre-order status (SM2020414186): it has been shipped on 2020-10-13 but now in one hand I’m so happy and on the other hand I’m really worried because my SM could be made on a “bad batch”.
Also… I think you should provide more technical details about the issue you got, how to solve it and how do you think to check and act on already shipped “bad batch”.
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