What is the relationship between CNCROi.com & CNCKing.com?

I’ve had quite a few online customers ask me what the relationship between CNCROi.com was with CNCKing.com.

Essentially, CNCKing.com was my door into the CNC industry. A door I made myself as there were no classes or any real knowledge about the industry back in 2008 that was unbiased.

Sure, you’d get your typical corporate “we are the best because… ” but nothing really out there that would help me learn how to design for CNC lasers, routers, plasmas and 3D printers. So, I taught myself… and began selling the fruits of my labor on CNCKing.com.

What I love about CNCKing.com was that it allowed me to have (and still to this day) a global conversation with CNC operators and shop owners in just about every country in the world… from Iran through to Australia, Europe and South America.

It’s quite fascinating the conversations I’ve had with some of the people, I discovered a lot about the industry and through the years, it gave me the knowledge and expertise to create pretty cool and unique projects for them.

When I first began, I had customers tell me they wanted XYZ and I’d design a custom model for them to cut and give to a customer… it’s great to gain first hand knowledge, prototyping and design knowledge from people who have lived in the CNC industry!

As my knowledge grew, I realized that most of what people took for “knowledge” wasn’t actually that, it was stuff thrown out there to keep others from copying them.

There was so much missing information that I decided to begin publishing books, printed on-demand and sold around the world, to help people with a resource I never had so they didn’t have to spend years learning what I had to teach myself.

During this time, I acquired numerous machines and, while I was living out of a suitcase for the better part of a decade, decided that my next toy had to be a laser. I had spent 7 YEARS designing for these machines and I knew by then that the laser was the pinnacle that I had to get. So, in August of 2014, I received my very first CNC laser, a Trotec Speedy 400 flexx… so fresh of the assembly line that I was the first in Canada to get it!

It’s an awesome machine and I can’t say enough great things about it to my clients… it was a MAJOR investment that I did without any customers at the time on their behalf. I had been in the CNC industry since 2008 and I knew the CNC machine pecking order, Trotec Lasers were the top of the line and I wanted my CNCROi.com customers to have access to nothing but the absolute best.

So, one one side, I had worked since 2008 designing for these machines over at CNCKing.com and I didn’t get my own machine until 7 years later which allowed me to share my knowledge and expertise with non-CNC laser owners over at CNCROi.com! While building-up CNCROi.com, a process that I’m still very active upon each and every day, I realized that although 90% of our business is 100% custom stuff, there is a segment of the visitors on the site who just want “standard” custom stuff from anodized aluminum business cards to physical kit models for their kids to build.

For these customers, 100% custom is simply overwhelming as they aren’t in the fields I typically service, it’s like having a site dedicated to mechanics selling auto parts and having customers who only want to buy a car, without caring about all the technical specs involved.

So, as a result, I started to slowly add to CNCKing.com physical kits, and will be adding a lot of other physical merchandise there as well. I own both sides and actively work on both.

I realize that the transition from one site to another is rather rough, I’ve been trying to figure-out a way to make both sides more seamless but they are such different sites, each serving very different demographics.

Until I figure something out, CNCROi.com will have a link to CNCKing.com’s physical product section while CNCKing.com will have a link to the general CNCROi.com site. Adding an e-commerce module to CNCROi.com simply doesn’t make sense at the moment as, to be frank, I already have an awesome e-commerce system running perfectly over at CNCKing.com. Maintaining two systems is just more work, at the moment, that could be better utilized elsewhere.

So, to summarize, CNCKing.com is where you get physical and digital CNC goods, while CNCROi.com is where custom CNC solutions for you are made. I’d love to integrate both sites into one but right now, it isn’t possible.