- Welcome back to another Pearson Workholding Q&A
and in today's episode,
I'm gonna be talking about my biggest machinery
and equipment purchasing regrets.
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So it's been a while since we've done a Q&A.
If you're new to the channel,
this channel is dedicated to workholding,
machinery, CNC machining
and educating about lean and business practices.
This is our Q&A series
and I just take a lot of questions
that I get on a regular basis
and answer them here for your benefit.
So today we're talking about machinery
and equipment purchasing regrets that I've made.
Now, we all have regrets in life.
I'm not immune to that,
so specifically let's jump right into machinery.
Now, number one, I would say I've really enjoyed
all the machines I've purchased.
They're all a little bit different.
I've learned a bunch about them,
but the one machine that sticks out that I regret purchasing
was my 2013
HAAS Super Mini Mill 2.
Now, I was at a point in business
where I needed another spindle
and I was used to my model year 2000, still own it,
Haas Mini Mill
and it's like a child to me.
I've had it for so long,
but I'm getting to the point
where it might need to move out of the house.
But I was familiar with the Mini Mills series,
so in 2013, I went to West Tech
and I saw one and it was the right form factor.
It was an upgrade from my just standard mini mill,
like a non-super speed mini mill, the very basic one
and I ended up buying it.
And what I was debated about
was whether I should get a VF1 or a Super Mini Mill 2.
At the time, they probably still are about the same price,
but for the size and the familiarity,
I went with the Super Mini Mill 2, big regret.
For me, the super means
it's basically a super speed high pitched ball screw.
For the size of the machine,
it was just scary fast all the time.
The mini mills have a welded steel frame
and the table moves so fast
that it just, it would just shake a lot.
It wasn't like a firm like dampening machine
that I'm used to with like one of the VFs.
One of the things that just you never got over,
you can set the rapid slower,
but you couldn't get over the fact
that the umbrella style tool changer
was just in and out so fast.
There was no 50 or 25 or 5% rapids on that.
When you change the tool, boom, it changes
and it was just something that I never got used to.
As far as the accuracy, it had a higher pitch ball screw
and from what I remember,
it was more susceptible to temperature variations.
So when the ball screw grew by just a few tenths
because of the pitch,
you would really see it show up in accuracy
and yeah, I just didn't like it.
We ended up keeping it for a total of five,
maybe even six, no five years
and we sold it when we moved.
So I owned it from 2013 to 2018
and in the latter years,
we just moved all the non-critical tolerance type stuff
to it.
I would say that the Mini Mill series is great.
I just can't recommend the Mini Mill 2,
especially the Super Mini Mill 2
when a VF1 is just
so much of a better machine.
Now, I've already done another Q&A
called Haas Versus Tormach where a customer asks me,
"Hey, I'm debating whether I get a Tormach
or a Haas Mini Mill or a Tool Room Mill."
And I talk about the differences between the Tormach,
the Toolroom, the Mini Mill and the VF Series.
Yeah, just the Mini Mill series to the VF,
it's again a night and day machine.
I wish I would have bought a VF1 or VF2.
Lesson learned, don't buy the machine for where you're at,
buy the equipment for where you want to go.
Now, my next equipment purchasing regret
would have to be
my Doosan 2-Axis Lathe.
Now, not because it's a Doosan,
not any of that, I'm not talking brand,
it's because it's a two-axis lathe.
That's a 220 LC, it does not have a subspindle.
My next machinery purchase
was a Doosan 220 LSYC,
which has live tooling,
it has Y-axis and it has a full subspindle.
It's about double the price,
but if you think about,
it's more than double the machine.
Not only do you have two spindles
you can hand off and have finished parts coming out,
but you can also do milling.
So we moved a lot of our simple milling
like where you would do an op one on the lathe
and then put it in op two in a vice
in typically our mini mill
and those machines are next to each other.
It just created a workflow
that instead of producing finished parts,
it was an operator picking up that half-finished part,
doing a second setup in a mill
and then finishing it there.
Yeah, I would never buy a two-axis lathe again,
no matter what brand.
Dual spindle Y-axis live tooling is the way to go.
And then in another, the next Q&A,
we'll talk about the Q&A between my ST30 Haas
versus the Doosan Lathe.
It's a real apples-to-apples comparison
now that we've owned both machines
for some quite a decent amount of time
to have a good opinion about them
and you'll see that in that,
I talk about how adding a bar feeder
it's like printing money.
It's like printing money, lights out all the time.
So yeah, I would not ever recommend anyone
buy it a two-axis lathe.
Lesson learned, buy for value, not price.
The smaller Doosan was cheaper than the bigger one,
but in the end, I paid a big price for it.
Now, my next regret
would be the first Universal Robots UR10 that I purchased.
At the time, 2012
is when I bought it,
so it's going back eight, nine years.
I was a one-man shop
and I think I was thinking about hiring
my first part-time worker
and I thought that that worker would be a robot, right?
A robot just shows up, it doesn't take days off,
it doesn't complain
and it does exactly what you tell it to
and that's the problem.
You gotta tell it exactly what to do.
If you haven't, go back and check out our robot series.
We have to program it to do everything right,
but we also have to make, consider all the things
that could go wrong
if it doesn't pick up a part,
if it goes to pick up a part and it's not there,
if it misloads the device, all of those things.
The part of the story with the robot series,
I owned that robot for maybe like six months
and I immediately sold it
and hired my first rock star employee, John,
who then was able to...
My shop suddenly became voice operated.
I can hand him a print, stack the material
and say, "Make this"
and it would just happen.
So the robot, I regret buying that.
I lost 4, $5,000
on the resale,
put it into another piece of equipment.
I just wish I never did that,
but hey, I learned a ton from making that by mistake.
Lesson learned, a robot is not a replacement for a human.
Invest in people, then free them up through automation.
Well, that's it for now.
Gosh, I'm gonna keep thinking on this one
because we all make mistakes in business.
I love mistakes.
They show us the areas where we need to improve
so that we can document it,
set a process and place
so that we don't make those mistakes again.
But if other regrets coming to mind,
I'm definitely gonna save that for another Q&A.
So subscribe if you're interested in this type of content.
So until next time, go innovate your production.
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