Amadeal Lathe failed - customer service appalling!

I had an electrical problem and did get a response from Amadeal at the second time of asking. A further query remains unanswered .

These companies sell their machines largely to an amateur market and the very least a supplier should do is provide some technical assistance and a clear and comprehensive wiring diagram for the particular machines that he sells. Providing a Chinese/ English manual with a minimalist wiring diagram is a sloppy and couldn't-care-less way of treating customers shelling out over a thousand pounds for their machinery.

American companies generally do better on this. The emphasis is on selling on this side of the pond and customer service comes a poor second.

Amadeal is only 20 minutes run from home for me and I went to have a look in 2017 before aquiring my Warco WM180 as Amadeal do the same basic machine. Their 'showroom' turned out to be an unmarked railway arch and there was initially no answer until I had one foot back in the car, when the main man finally peered outside to see what I looked like.

The place is not very big and is basically a small warehouse operation where crates arrive from China and are sent on to the buyers. Approx. on third of the space was taken up with a pile of mini-lathes in various states of disassembly, presumably warranty returns. The man was apparently friendly when he learned that I was genuinely interested in one of the machines and levered the top off of the crate to let me take a look. As far as I can recall there appeared to be no engineering on site and if there was a bench present it was a very small one.....

The main mental and emotional activity of 'the man' was selling.......his strategy was to slag off the likes of Warco & Chester as being very expensive compared to him. However, it was fairly easy to tot up the price and work out that, actually, Warco's price was considerably better since they threw in two chucks, two steadies and a faceplate etc...the Amadeal machine only came with a 3 jaw, although it did have a pot of touch up paint which Warco don't include!

A couple of days later I went around the M25 to Chidingfold to give Warco the once over. Within minutes of getting out of the car I liked what I saw and realised that they are the opposite of Amadeal in that they are offering a sorted out set of products for a carefully sorted out price.... There's nothing wrong with Chinese machines and, frankly, they are the only game in town for people like me, but it's ESSENTIAL that you buy from a reputable concern who are prepared to open the boxes BEFORE they pass it on to you.

Check out this unhappy customers dealings with Amadeal customer services & a Mini lathe that had problems.

https://youtu.be/lNrCPzFDuKU

Just had a look at Amadeal's website and noticed they are selling the new Syil X5+ 4 axis CNC milling machine for £11.000+.

One thing sets my alarm bells ringing is that the machine is fitted with Mach3 operating system, which as far as I know is no longer supported or updated by Newfangled Solutions. I would expect a new hobby CNC to come equipped with Mach4.

Makes me wonder what sort of back up and after sales service this company can offer for a machine like this, let alone a Mini lathe?

Ian

Yeah looks like I should have done a bit more digging. The manual is very hard to read and understand and is full of grammatical errors also.

Thanks for posting this story, wish I'd known about this before. All this suffering! I sent them an ultimatum email. If they don't either repair, replace or refund it, I'm gonna kick off as much as possible basically. Citizens advice, trading standards and what now. It's just very very lazy service. I did some digging beforehand, but apparently not enough to realise how terrible their after sales support is.

If they do not respond properly to your email, opem a small claims court claim on line. This is easy and often brings a prompt resolution. You can do it online:
https://www.gov.uk/make-money-claim

Claim the item is not fit for purpose, they have not responded properly and you want a full refund.Make sure your claim includes them paying for the cost of returning the lathe.

Robert G8RPI.

Sorry to hear about your story and abysmal service. Note by the way that Amadeal are linked as a shopping partner on this site. If you don't get a result from Amadeal there is always a solution.

Several years ago when I was looking round to buy my lathe I too took a good look at the Amadeal site, however I bought mine and my mill from SPG Tools as it was much better tooled. The products as far as I could tell from the photos came from the same factory. In the many discussions I had on the phone with SPG it was emphasised that when starting the lathe always make sure the speed was turned down to minimum before switching on to avoid damaging the electronic controller card and make a habit of turning the speed to minimum before switching off in normal use. This seemed to be to avoid a big inrush current, I believe, on the SCRs of the controller card. Despite doing this and the lathe serving me well it went wrong after the guarantee period. My problem was it went at full rpm with no control from the pot.

Being in France, so remote to SPG in the UK I took matters into my own hands and investigated. The DC motor was OK, no probs, the pot tested OK so it was the motor controller card. Investigations on the net revealed that the factory fitted a Chinese copy of a KB Electronics card, the KB original being noted for its reliability. So I found a UK distributor who sold online and ordered one and its heat sink. I did have to make some mods in the housing at the back of the lathe and in fact fitted the controller to the door so making future maintenance easier.

Since then I am a happy bunny with the lathe. I have also done component testing on the card and confirmed the 2 thyristors are shorted, so that will be a repair to do which will then give me a spare speed controller for other DC motors.

I have had a different experience with Amadeal.

From the original post, it is obvious that Adam Hebbard is not happy with Amadeal, but this is his first post on this forum. As far as I can see, there are two reasons to post on here with the sort of title he has used - one is to let others know of his experience, the other is to damage the reputation of the company.

There have been other posts where people have had issues with other companies supplying lathes and accessories, including the well known ones who advertise on this site.

If you look at the warranties for other companies, they either have 'back to base' where you have to pay for returns or parts only after 6 months etc, so the fact that Amadeal have offered to pick the lathe up at their expense actually seems better. Obviously it wasn't picked up when arranged, but I did not see that they had refused to rearrange this, just that they wouldn't do this on a Saturday because of the extra expense. I don't think this is unusual, even for big companies.

I bought a mini lathe from Amadeal about 2 years ago. I decided to buy from them because it seemed to have the best spec at the best price compared to other companies. I guess that the OP did the same.

I realised that it was a small company and that there may be a trade off between price and customer service if I had any issues.

The lathe was delivered quickly by courier on the day specified. A few days later the plastic carriage handwheel broke. I rang Amadeal about 4pm, they said they would send a replacement which came the next day, which I thought was excellent customer service.

Since then I have bought a few small items from them which all arrived next day. I have never had any problems contacting them.

I did have an issue with a lathe collet chuck I bought. The runout was more than I expected and when I looked at it, the bore had not been machined correctly. I rang Amadeal and got through straight away. I was asked to send them an email with a photo of the problem. They emailed back saying they would send me another together with a prepaid envelope to return the faulty one. This arrived next day, but had the same problem. I rang them again (got through again straight away) and said I wanted to return them both for a refund. They agreed to this and said they would arrange for their courier to pick them up. I offered to post them back instead and they agreed to refund the cost of the item plus postage costs. I had paid via paypal, so they refunded to my paypal account the day they received the items back.

My point is that it is easy for one persons experience (which does not meet their expectations) can possibly give a distorted view of a company. Happy customers do not tend to volunteer there experiences in the same way..

I have no connection to Amadeal, other than as a customer.

Stuart

Thanks for this link, may find it very useful.

Thank you for pointing that out, can always go via here if needed too then, thanks.

I also didn't know about the motor speed thing, starting at low and turning it up. This was never mentioned to me anywhere. Nor did it even occur.

Thanks Stuart for sharing.

My aim is not just to kick off for no reason. My machine failed, and they have become very hard to get any answers or support out of, and have taken to becoming rather rude over the phone.

I understand the point about saturday. But they had originally agreed to collect the previous saturday, with no mention about the issue of cost. To confirm, I then had to be out that saturday so I asked to delay it to wednesday. To then bring up the cost issue on that next wednesday seemed odd. Especially after asking me to pay for it. Considering they have sent me all these parts saying 'I'm sure this will fix the problem', and then saying 'Oh, we don't have a service engineer', is not inspiring any confidence. A few weeks I could understand. But this has gone on for well over 2 months now, for a problem that a company with more pro-active support could have solved much more efficiently.

I'm glad you haven't had the same trouble, I guess it's each to their own, no argument there. But looking at this overall thread, it's clear this issue does run a bit deeper than just me, I'm not an isolated case.

a faulty machine will always raise someones ire, unfortunately ALL uk lathe (chinese) suppliers have had bad publicity due to faulty machines/poor service at some time.

Amadeal are no different in this respect, unfortunately one bad review can spoil an otherwise blemish free existance.

my experience of Amadeal has been nothing but positive, i bought a AMA210 about 8 years ago, with other accesories being added over time.

ALL chinese machines are built to a price and are only classified as amateur use.

yes! it is frustrating when it happens to you, but can you say hand on heart YOU are not part of the problem?

i am sure there are a lot more satisfied customers of Amadeal out there.

yes! there customer service may suck on this occasion, but that again may be down to you.

look at it from their point of view, there is not a lot of profit to start with, after 11 months someone complains his machine broke, all the profit suddenly vanishes trying to clear it up.

i am not saying you are wrong, after all the customer is always right ?.

there has been a large amount of feedback on this forum about all the uk chinese machine sellers, only one seems to stand out head and shoulders above the rest and that is Arceurotrade, but even they have had some bad press. it is all part of the business.

i do hope you get your lathe sorted out soon without any more hassle.

bad reviews always get the limelight, good reviews less so.

Hi, thanks for your response.

Of course I'm upset it's faulty. And my first thoughts were to check and see if it was something I had been doing. I checked with some friends and fellow machinists on techniques, usage and maintenance, and have also been extremely careful with the machine. I even discussed this with Amadeal over the phone, and they agreed this is not a fault that should have occurred. Melted connectors in the back of the machine isn't a good sign. I don't see any way I could have caused that, and they agreed. But as time has gone on, they've just become less and less helpful and ended up being rude over the phone after spending time messing me about.

I understand things break, and things go wrong. But to use a car analogy, if your car failed within the warranty period, the garage sent you parts to replace yourself, said that they had no engineers to help fix the issue, and then became very hard to contact, you would be pleased would you? Also, if you buy a cheaper car, do you expect it to be faulty? Just because it's cheaper, doesn't mean it shouldn't work. Of course I would buy a high end machine if I could afford one, but as many people will relate to, it just isn't possible.

I don't understand how it would be down to ME that their service is bad? They've not been getting back to me, or pro-actively helping me solve the issue. They all but ignore me until I chase them hard, and then they're defensive and verging on rude on the phone.

I would normally agree with the bad reviews outshining the good, but I have a lot of experiencing in weighing up different companies in the light of reviews. The area I do machining in has several small companies and it is abundantly clear which have the bad reviews, and which have the good. There are also some much larger companies in the field, some of which I know are dodgy, provide very bad service and have questionable practices, but most of their reviews are good.

I wasn't posting here in order to stir up trouble for Amadeal, I don't see the point in that. I wanted to know if anyone else has had a similar experience with a lathe of this type, or the company, and how it was resolved.

Seeing the bulk of responses on this thread, I'm not alone. Doesn't mean the overwhelming amount of their customers have had this experience, but it's clear it's not just me.

Thanks, I hope it gets solved too. I use the lathe for my hobby and as side income. The issue is I haven't been able to build anything for more than 2 months now, and it's grating on that part of my life. I'm also losing income and have several unhappy and impatient customers of my own

Thank you for your insight, and also thanks to everyone for responding

Hi Ian,

Thanks for responding. Yeah, interesting point to be made!

Again, I'm not trying to just stir up trouble. I've desperately tried to get this issue fixed but they keep messing me around and claiming they don't even have an engineer to fix it. So even if they do come and collect it, what's going to happen then?

Thanks, I hope it gets solved too. I use the lathe for my hobby and as side income. The issue is I haven't been able to build anything for more than 2 months now, and it's grating on that part of my life. I'm also losing income and have several unhappy and impatient customers of my own.

THAT may well sum up your position and sink any chance of retribution. IF that lathe, as many others are, was sold as ‘hobby use only‘, you have just cooked your goose by clearly stating it has been used for purposes other than hobby use! Beware, too, that nobody quietly reports this to inland revenue/income tax if you are not already reporting your side income.....

I use it for my hobby, and I also sell the things I make. Using it for the same thing whether I sell the end result or not. It has not been constantly used and abused. It was used for a few hours a week, if even that. So it has not been worked to death in the slightest.

I also report all my income (though very little) to HMRC, so I'm all perfectly legal.

The current model I have is no longer on their site, the closest match is this...

**LINK**

... and nowhere does it specify what you can use them for. You use them for machining metal...

From the Amadeal website for mini lathes " Ideal for the professional engineer or model maker " So thier bench lathes should be OK for professional use.

Intrestingly thay sell "customer returns" for repair which seems to confirm their lack of technical back-up

Thanks Robert. Yes I was never under the impression it could only be used for certain things. Again, it's really not been used 24/7 365 or anything.

These come with a 5 year warranty. If I'm going to buy a Chinese lathe, I'd rather buy a one without the speed controller board for a discount and fit one of these.

kbmm-225-dc-motor-speed-controller