Hurco Aquires Milltronics and Takumi

John Welden said:

Garbage machines shouldn't be discussed on this forum. This place is for professionals. Not hobby guys. Can't we have one forum for just us? Why do you guys have to ruin it for us? I don't know why Don only draws the line at like Jet lathes and what not. The line should be any machine that is priced at less than $150k when new. And if you've ever used a Tormach you should be banned.

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Mr. Tormach isn't even in the ground yet.............

John Welden said:

Garbage machines shouldn't be discussed on this forum. This place is for professionals. Not hobby guys. Can't we have one forum for just us? Why do you guys have to ruin it for us? I don't know why Don only draws the line at like Jet lathes and what not. The line should be any machine that is priced at less than $150k when new. And if you've ever used a Tormach you should be banned.

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Look at the liberal advocate for discrimination. Can't the strait people have one bakery for themselves?

Machinist Utopia. Where tools never break and no one has ever heard of a Tormach...

Alloy Mcgraw said:

Look at the liberal advocate for discrimination. Can't the strait people have one bakery for themselves?

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Weak ass counter troll. Step up your game son.

alphonso said:

I'm afraid if I did that those 8, 9 and 10+ hour jobs would never get finished. You just have to trust your set up and programming skills( and hope there isn't a zig instead of a zag 7 hours in.)

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Hey, I didn't mean you to run the whole shebang, nor that it was supposed to be run at normal feeds/speeds, nor that you have to run the entire program.
But, the Haas has another nice feature there, which is handwheel feed override. Just push the button and spin the handwheel up or down from 0% to 1000%.

Which BTW brings up another thing I despise, which is an F'n potentiometer for speed/feed override like on some ( exmpl. Hurco ) controls.

SeymourDumore said:

Hey, I didn't mean you to run the whole shebang, nor that it was supposed to be run at normal feeds/speeds, nor that you have to run the entire program.
But, the Haas has another nice feature there, which is handwheel feed override. Just push the button and spin the handwheel up or down from 0% to 1000%.

Which BTW brings up another thing I despise, which is an F'n potentiometer for speed/feed override like on some ( exmpl. Hurco ) controls.

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I had a 1986 gildemeister that had the handwheel override, wonderful feature. 1% control over all movement - I wish all my other machines had that.

I have mixed feelings about the pot overrides. I don't like it for what it is, but I like it much better than say, the rotary switch overrides on the Fanucs. On machines with 30+ m/min rapids, having nothing between 0 and 25% on the rapid override is stupid.

Well at least john thinks my Milltronics lathe is garbage. I would not mind another one, that thing has made me more money than the rest of the shop in the last 6 years and has only cost me the price of a set of drive belts.

Bruce Nelson said:

Why do you care, John? You ain't never bought a machine tool, anyway.

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It bring up an interesting fact about John. If you don't know your ass from your head you may just be talking out your ass. The guy is a grunt...what do you expect.

moonlight machine said:

Well at least john thinks my Milltronics lathe is garbage. I would not mind another one, that thing has made me more money than the rest of the shop in the last 6 years and has only cost me the price of a set of drive belts.

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Imagine how much money you could have made with a good machine. You could have bid jobs that were tighter than plus or minus ten thou.

The Milltronics lathe that I seen at a tool show a few yrs back was the most flimsy thing I ever seen.

Chineese cast iron has got to be the cheapest part of the machine, so why not start with a heavy section to at least make that part look like it's going to hold up?


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

I put a Dorian turret on it, holds .0005 now. For the low production stuff I do, mostly my own products it would not pay to spend 100K + on some fancy pants machine.

John:
Why only 150k? The sky is the limit if you don't actually buy anything.

Milltronics today makes some pretty good machines. We’ve used them for 20 years. 20 years ago they made, well to be honest, junk by today’s standards. But so did Haas, Fadal, Tree, Bridgeport and a few others, I know because I used a few back in the late 80’s that you wanted to throw away after 3 years. You just did what you had to do with what was available then. Milltronics never had the huge financial resources to advertise and promote their products like Haas did to beat back the negative rumors. They were all cheap and a lot of small start up shops bought them by the thousands. Many are still running today. Two years ago we traded an 18 year old one that was still running strong for a new 30 X 20 VM20, it weighs in at 11K pounds, no light weight in my book for a machine that size. Almost twice what our old 26 X 16 Partner 1 weighed and the same as our 40 X 24 VM24. As far as controllers go, I can’t say much because we have used a CAM system to program everything but set ups are very quick and easy. Milltronics was a great company to work with if you ever needed help even though we didn’t very often. I’m worried that their level of service may suffer now.

$150K minimum machine price to discus CNC on this forum? That would eliminate more than half the machines sold today I would think.

Hasn't anyone here gotten by with beat-to-hell equipment because you knew how it worked, what didn't work, and gotten creative and still made parts, and payed bills with it? I.e. old fadal....

As we bash milltronics now, just how different is a milltronics from hass with capabilities? Now having yaskawa servo drives and a Dos? based pc control, I'd take a milltronics over hass once the machine is out of warrenty. Drive goes out? No problem! download teh Yaskawa software from their website, ghost the old parameters and load them onto a new drive from wherever you can get one. No getting stuck with an OEM entirely. Some parts sure OEM makes the most sense. Personally I wouldn't buy a Hurco Hass or Milltronics unless they were very, very cheap. Dosnt mean I wont even talk about them....