I'd like to talk to you today about the right-to-repair.
A lot of people take for granted that when they buy something they'll be able to repair it,
or at least take it to the technician of their choice to be repaired, but increasingly that's
not the case. I'll give you an example. My wife has a fairly new car and we have to take that
car to the dealership to get the oil changed. That drives me nuts. We paid for the car, I think that
we should be able to change the oil ourselves, or at least take it to the corner auto shop.
Unfortunately, the machine tool industry appears to be following the path taken by
the auto industry, the consumer electronics industry; they're shifting their business
model so that more and more of their revenue comes from servicing their,
or I should say, your equipment. So at Tormach, we design our equipment to be user installed,
user serviced, user maintained, and user upgradable. And that's what the
right to repair means to me. It means that when you buy this equipment you own it.
You're not stuck with some service key, you're not stuck calling a factory approved technician.
You actually own the product and you're able to do with it what you want. We do this in
order to help people make things, that's our mission at Tormach - helping people make stuff.
So user serviceability in my mind is a huge part of that, because it keeps the cost of
ownership low and a low cost of ownership is what helps people be successful with our equipment.
So imagine if you will, buying a CNC machine and having the control frozen in time
at the moment you took that machine home. That seems insane to me. You're locking your customers
out of further improvements or even bug fixes to that software. Now we release new new PathPilot
updates every month, every two months. Sometimes they're just small fixes that have been reported
by customers that we've gone ahead and fixed, often it's major enhancements to our software
and this software is available to people all the way back who bought our first equipment.
PathPilot automatically updates itself but those updates are provided to you in the easiest way
possible, and at no cost. And that's the way it should be. I think in this day and age it's almost
criminal that some manufacturers charge thousands of dollars for software updates to their controls.
These are complex systems. Occasionally something may break.
We realize that and we want you to be successful fixing it yourself. We use
to the extent we can, industry standard components inside our machine tools. And we maintain a stock
of replacement parts for every tool we've ever made. We have fantastic technical documentation
that walks our customers through replacing a worn out component. And we couple all of that with free
web, email, and phone based technical support. We have machinists and engineers who will pick
up the phone and talk you through some of these problems and we've done this for the life of
the machine this is not a oh in your first year of ownership we'll talk to you this is
a lifetime technical support program that we have. I want you to know that we at Tormach really care
about this. We care about the right-to-repair. We care about enabling you to upgrade, maintain,
service. your equipment. It's important to us and it's not an accident that machines that we sold 15
years ago, the very first PCNC 1100's that we sold are still in use today. So if you'd like
to find out more about the right-to-repair and Tormach's approach to the right-to-repair, please
check out our webpage linked in the video description below thank you for watching.