[panaceabea]

How long does it usualy take to get a new milling center delivered from Milltronics?

I ordered a new rw15 on sept 10 th and was assured it would be delivered and setup by the end of september. Made contact with the salesman again on the 21st of september and was assured yet again that the machine would be delivered and setup in my shop here in north florida by the end of september. 2 weeks ago I had to send $15k in overflow work to another shop that was going to pay for a substantial chunk of this new machine. The end of October is just a few days a way and I still have no idea when the machine is going to arrive. Is this normal operating procedure? I could have had a comparable machine from another manufacturer up and running over a month ago .

[AMCjeepCJ]

Mine came in just as promised! Sorry about your luck...

[panaceabea]

thanks, was yours a recent purchase or before the change of ownership?

I am unsure if the company is having problems with meeting promised delivery dates or if I have just been lied to by a salesmen trying to close a deal, either way its changed my perception of the company and it really wouldnt hurt my feelings if they would just refund my deposit. I was initialy told that the factory had made the assurance that the machine would be delivered and setup by the end of last month.

Responses to emails have been nothing more than one line responses stating they will contact me when the machine is ready and projected dates, 3 in all and all 3 have passed with no machine.Never an explanation or apology . A simple explanation or offer of expidited shipping or some other small perk would have gone along way.


I was planning to purchase a new cnc lathe over the next 2-3 weeks and based on this its doubtful its a milltronics. The part that upsets me is having to give away a chunk of work because of a missed delivery date. If the salesmen had simply been honest and told me from the begining that it was going to take aprox 2 months I could have bought the Hass that was on the floor at another dealer and have been up and running in less than two weeks. Apologies for the long rant , just a little disappointed

[panaceabea]

Machine arrived today, very impressive, clean well layed out wiring, everything looks like it will be easy to get to and work on down the road. Service guy popped up to check on the progress about an hour after the truck left, pretty impressive considering his shop is about 5 hours away one way. Says they will be back Wednesday for the final tweaking and setup and leveling . Machine is all setup, electrician left about an hour ago , so it looks like once the setup guy comes wednesday I will be ready to go.

My only gripe at this point which may manifest into more of a problem down the road is there are a couple of rust spots that have grown enough to raise the paint on the front of the sheetmetal cabinet, one enough to chip a little paint off . Hopefully it wont blossom any further.

[panaceabea]

Service guy called and says it will be Monday the 12th before they can have anybody here for the training and set up , considering the machine is already a month past its due date it doesnt seem unreasonable to think somebody would rush right up here and give me a few hours of training and level the machine instead of putting me off another week.

[bborb]

_You need to contact the sales manager at the Milltronics factory. The only feedback the factory gets is from customers themselves. If the customer continues to let the local dealer handle damage control, Milltronics will never hear about it, and you get crapped on and the dealer gets sales awards.
_You should have already screamed loud enough for them to hear you in Minnesota.

[Farmers Machine]

Your problem sounds like it is with your dealer and not Milltronics. When I have dealt with them at the factory on lathe upgrades you could not find a better company any where to do business with!!! If you buy a lathe that is not Milltronics you will have another control to learn and when you learn to run the Centurion control you will probably jerk your knee and hip out of socket kikking your own butt. My biggest customer has a Fanuc shop, I do all of his short run specials because it is so simple to program complex oil tool parts with out having a $20,000.00 CAD CAM. Heat Treated 4140, castings and forgings with interrupted cuts are brutal on a machine, My ML20 is going on 7 years and still holding .0005 on down hole oil tool parts every day all day. You may call Milltronics and complain about your dealer and get better results. Good luck The Farmer

[bborb]

I agree with The Farmer in that I have only had positive experiences with Milltronics Manufacturing. A dealer is lucky to represent their products and it seems your's keeps dropping the ball.

[panaceabea]

we'll see how it goes. I fired the machine up this morning and loaded the carousel and it appears the software for the arm type tool changer is loaded and my machine is equipped with the carousel type tool changer. I sent the factory an email this morning now just waiting on a response

[panaceabea]

response as expected, the rep that sold me the machine will be in contact

[bborb]

Make sure the wiring diagrams and the hardcopy of the parameters is in the door of the electrical cabinet and the serial number of these match your machine, along with a floppy disk containing the backup parameters. Used to be the case that several different toolchanger/style files are loaded in the control and a toolchange parameter specified which file the machine would use.
_Keep us posted, hundreds of people have viewed this thread, many possible future customers of Milltronics (or not).

[panaceabea]

Milltronics says my line voltage of 242 ac is to high to operate the machine, power company says its spot on and they are not making any adjustments.


Waiting on a buck and boost transformer to arrive to drop my line voltage under 240vac before I proceed, should be here Friday, cant wait to get started.

Based on a comment made yesterday I know someone at Milltronics is monitering this thread, I called and spoke with a tech who was going to calculate which transformer I needed to drop line voltage,Brian, very nice fellow, He turned me over to someone in sales who said they would call me right back with the transformer I needed to order , that was around lunch, 7:00 pm now , still no call back as promised. I made it very clear that this needed to be handled in a timely fashion, I hope the machine is better than the customer commitment. Apologies for whining, i am sure all will be well when I get oer the customer service hump

[panaceabea]

end of day two and the guy from Milltronics still has not called back, are long delays common?

Transformer arrived from the company I bought the machine thru, dropped the voltage from 242 to 208 , I assume this is enough for proper operation of the machine , its wired from milltronics for single phase.

Its still going to be monday before the service guy comes to set the machine up and its driving me nuts wanting to play with the new machine since thats 4 days away. When I power the machine up everything appears ok, home the machine and it operates correctly. When I enter a tool change like T1M6 in the MDI line, the head travels up to within 4 inches of hitting the limit switch, pauses and ask if a tool is in the spindle, hit the cycle start button and the spindle spins about 3 revs and indexes to pick up a tool and the head travels all the way to the top of its travel, dwells (against a stop I am guessing) for about 3-4 seconds then the z axis drive faults. When I called Milltronics a few days ago they stated the 242 line voltage was the problem , I am now at 208 volts , problem still exist. Any thoughts, I hate to loose three more days waiting on " good customer service"

[bborb]

"its wired from milltronics for single phase."
The machine is wired for single phase? What is your air pressure going into the machine? Can you tell what style (if any) is the Z-axis counterbalance? I've seen some that have a counterweight and some use an air cylinder. The specs on Milltronics website doesn't say.

[single phase]

end of day two and the guy from Milltronics still has not called back, are long delays common?

Transformer arrived from the company I bought the machine thru, dropped the voltage from 242 to 208 , I assume this is enough for proper operation of the machine , its wired from milltronics for single phase.

Its still going to be monday before the service guy comes to set the machine up and its driving me nuts wanting to play with the new machine since thats 4 days away. When I power the machine up everything appears ok, home the machine and it operates correctly. When I enter a tool change like T1M6 in the MDI line, the head travels up to within 4 inches of hitting the limit switch, pauses and ask if a tool is in the spindle, hit the cycle start button and the spindle spins about 3 revs and indexes to pick up a tool and the head travels all the way to the top of its travel, dwells (against a stop I am guessing) for about 3-4 seconds then the z axis drive faults. When I called Milltronics a few days ago they stated the 242 line voltage was the problem , I am now at 208 volts , problem still exist. Any thoughts, I hate to loose three more days waiting on " good customer service"

It sounds like the tool change is working normally up till the point when the drive faults. But I have no idea why the drive is faulting.

You could try a tool change with a tool number higher than 20. It will do a manual tool change in that case. Does it home the tool changer normally if you tell it to?

I have a VM-15 from 1998. I run it on 242V single phase. My voltage varies between 239 and 243. However I know your control is 10 years newer than mine and may not be comparable.

Cheers
SF

[One of Many]

If the head is at the proper position for the tool change, then I would expect the same fault to exist during a jog up or G98, G28-30(return to reference) in MDI, provided the parameters are set properly.

Other than that, I would double check there is no cardboard shipping protection pinching in the Z path. We just recieved a new VK-4 and I did install the Z motor, so if by chance the Z encoder ended up in a slightly different position in reference to home limit. This could upset the travel envelope enough to get absolute Z zero reference just outside the travel as it sets. Although, I would expect the tool change position to be off some also, if this were the case. It is all relative to home...... even the Z homing cam or switch position integrity.

Next, I would be looking at tool length offsets and possibly parameters related to the homing position.

In my days in field service, there were plenty of warnings during the pre-installation meetings, where new machines were never to be started up by the customer in an effort to avoid the potential for warranty issues created by improper voltage, machine motion conflicts and passing the basic clear bill of health due to shipping damage etc. Often they were shipped with wires to be connected and options setup in the field. These policies were to prevent the eager not only from harming the equipment and themselves, but holding the OEM responsible as a result if something did go wrong.

Sorry to hear you are having delays with your local supporting distributor. That gives Milltronics a bad rap they may not deserve directly. I certainly hope it is not a sign of things to come with the ownership changes. The distributors are independent, so I'd lean on them as they represent the whole package in quality of sales/service they provide, regardless of who's name is on the machine.

DC

[panaceabea]

Air pressure at the little digital gauge on the machine is 102 psi , Although I havent seen them I believe from looking thru one of the manuals that the counterbalance is a wieghted chain.
One of Many you did bring up a good point and its probably my problem, the Rigger had to remove the z axis motor to get the machine thru the door and its probably out of sync , I assumed when it was put back on that position wouldnt be an issue since they knew at the factory the motor had to come off to get in the door. It had instructions for the rigger taped to the crate about removing the z-axis motor but no pre-cautions about re-alignment . We all just figured when it homed the first time it would reset and know where it was .

Its not faulting on the z-axis when jogging or homing, only when trying to do a tool change

[bborb]

Does your Z-axis drive have an LED display? Is there an alarm number being displayed on the drive?
_Any shipping brackets still in place for the counterbalance?

[panaceabea]

spent a portion of this morning on the phone with one of the techs at milltronics, when we put the motor back on the z-axis we were off a little , got within about .040" of original position and he walked me thru re-calibrating, seems to be running great.

I still need to figure how to configure my post processor in mastercam to output usable files before I can make chips , but i am getting closer. Basic G-code files that run in my other two mills both return a 602 error message "missing wend statement"

[panaceabea]

Well Monday is here and half over, still waiting on the service guy to arrive for that $3400 day of factory training and instal, called the sales company about an hour ago to see why the service guy wasnt here this morning as promissed, lady said she would look into and give me a call back.I dont know what thats supposed to mean.

Not a problem with Milltronics but considering this is the company they picked to represent them in the state of Florida it does reflect negatively on them. So far I like the machine and am considering adding a second one within a few weeks but refuse to go thru this again