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We bought 3 Yama Seiki GLS-2000-LYS turning centers a little over a year ago. The dealer in our area at the time was not able to set up, or train us on the machines we bought. Concept Machine Tool in Delafield Wisconsin (unlike the dealer we purchased through) may be able to support these machines and I believe they are highly capable and professional. Yama Seiki, as of last year, offered machine settup with fly out employees on new equipment for $2500 per machine (a discounted rate for new equipment) and I would strongly recommend any customer buy that service if you don't have experience with your dealer, on a turning center with a bar loader, and make sure they look at and understand the options list prior to purchasing.

We didn't get training and had a tough time getting machines set up and getting operational, but Yama Seiki factory support was very helpful to us and helped to get us running. We appreciate their help and support. I believe Yama Seiki customer support is high quality.

The machines themselves are a very value added product. As we configured the machines we purchased: with main and subspindle air blows, auto doors, part conveyors, short servo loaders, tool life and tool load monitoring, Fanuc manual guide I, 31i-B control, automatic folding renishaw tool setters, and Chip Blaster M30-70 high pressure coolant, our machine packages (per machine) were probably $30,000 lower cost than market competitors. We integrated 2 UR robot unloaders for $26,500 each and are below the cost of market competitors who use budget slower Oi-TF controls on what are probably higher quality constructed machines. If I had it to do again, I probably would have bought through spindle coolant- that's probably the only option we didn't buy that would have been useful.

No two brands machines in this class are alike. Obviously cost and quality vary. There are better machines in the product category, but one of the nice things about working with Yama Seiki was that the machine was sold as a package with a bar loader and chip conveyor, and the control was a 31i-B, not an obsolete Oi-TF, the machine came with some live tooling, and the machine was affordable.

With other market brands stupid games often are played- no live tools are included, options are sometimes capable of seriously running up prices.

We have a Kitagawa workholding BB-206 and long adaptor plate on 2 of the machines and this allows them to process parts less than 2" diameter up to 8.5 or 9" in length. We one operation manufacture a lot of parts that would be 4 operation parts in conventional CNC machines. Each machine has made in the ballpark of 20,000 parts at this point. We drill 34mm holes with Sandvik 880 drills at feeds of .005" rev in 17-4 stainless steel, and the machines handle that capably. We have noticed it is important to put cut pressure into the ways as these are linear guide machines. In late January I believe the machines will have paid for themselves in savings over cost at our old vendor prices. That's about a year and a half to ROI the equipment. It would have been 13 months, but having no training from the dealer seriously delayed us on the front end.

In closing, we just want people to know, looking back on the year and a half we have had these machines, I can say they were a good purchase, and the company has quality factory support. We have around 1300 hours of cut time per machine on the 3 machines, and we feel that they will probably run reliably for several more years. We run them 16 hours a day 5 days a week, with about 1.5 hours of down time for breaks. If anyone has any question they can ask me. We've offered to allow Concept Tool to show their Wisconsin area customers our machines with advance notice and we hope Yama Seiki continues to grow their market share in the US.

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It's Jan 2 2018 and we came into work and programs from 2 machines running Friday Dec 29 would not run this morning. We found the problem in the program called by the subspindle C axis mode M219 command. That program is 9025 in our machines. There was an if-then statement saying essentially, if the date is Jan 1 2018 or later, skip the subprogram and throw the "C axis commanded in spindle mode" message - deadlining the machine.

In my opinion this was added by our original dealer Precision Machine Tool (PMT). It cost us one scrap part, and an hour of our time this morning. We were only able to edit the 9025 in one of the machines, the other was protected and we had to roll the date to 2017 for now to work today. I see it as a built in service call. Essentially planned theft (hope for billing of labor and travel not required). We have 3 of these machines, and the third had very minimal involvement with PMT, and it was the only machine not to have this statement in the 9025 program which gives me the impression this is not something Yama Seiki put there. We also have occasional EX1051 MACHINE LOCKED messages that pop up with the dealers phone number requesting a code from the dealer that locks the machine in an error status requiring a power down restart to clear. The customer doesn't need that kind of bull****. It's enough challenge to keep the machines operational if the only service interruptions are real mechanical or maintenance issues. I don't fault YSI for these dealer issues, but I would appreciate a resolution. We're not renting the machine from the dealer- we paid for it, so we should be able to work with it.

Attachment 383040

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Yama Seiki edited the PLC which was modified apparently by the machine tool dealer to call a macro to output the EX1051 MACHINE LOCKED message and their service phone number. That problem is probably resolved. We appreciate the Yama Seiki support.

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We learned there is a parameter controlling the speed of the turret during a reset procedure, make sure you have someone move that from 1 to 50 or so. That was something we learned a little late in the game- glad to know it now. The Yama Seiki machines are running well, and they are pretty capable machines.