[jwatte]

We had a blown spindle on a super mini which took over a week to get , vs matsuura who I've seen ship a spindle from Japan to Canada and had it installed within 24 hrs .

How much did you pay for that Matsuura service, though? If your business is all about the specialty parts, and the cost of the machine is a small fraction of the overall cost, that kind of service makes total sense. And if the machine is two million bucks, and you're paying 10% financing on that, it would be worth it to avoid the downtime, too...

(No, really, I'm quite interested: how much was the Matsuura spindle replacement service? It would be useful to know!)

[metalmayhem]

How much did you pay for that Matsuura service, though? If your business is all about the specialty parts, and the cost of the machine is a small fraction of the overall cost, that kind of service makes total sense. And if the machine is two million bucks, and you're paying 10% financing on that, it would be worth it to avoid the downtime, too...

(No, really, I'm quite interested: how much was the Matsuura spindle replacement service? It would be useful to know!)

do you think it is ok to wait a week for a spindle on a lesser cost industrial machine than a more expensive one when service charges are going to be comparable . A weeks worth of lost revenue can't be made back , and regaining lost time can be difficult for a company that is running at full capacity . Down time is down time and it's not recoverable

the spindle at the time was 15k , I'm not sure what the service charge was because I was an employee and that wasn't my problem . But , the service charge would have been no different than haas , mori or any other significant machine distributor .
If I recall correctly the mill was roughly 230k and not 2m . Regardless matsuura immediately had that spindle on a plane from Japan and it was installed within 24 hours . Haas was a week to receive the spindle and the company spent top dollar to have some incompetent twit install it .
For the most part a customer doesn't deal directly with the machine company and they deal through the distributors . The customer is at the mercy of the distributor but the distributor is also at the mercy of the manufacturer

[jwatte]

If the price is the same, clearly I'll take the 24 hour turnaround :-)

If I'm a prototype/development shop, downtime costs have to be weighted against the budget that a cost center has to live with. (R&D is always "cost," never "future profit," for some mysterious reason.) So, if the Haas has the lower cost, the guy with the spreadsheet will approve.

AAAnyway. I'm lucky that I'm just dealing with my own machine in my own garage at my own time, in that sense. FWIW, Tormach makes it very clear on their website that they don't even have schmucks-with-phones in the area, and you'll get to do the service yourself, so everything comes on a scale ...

[metalmayhem]

I

AAAnyway. I'm lucky that I'm just dealing with my own machine in my own garage at my own time, in that sense. FWIW, Tormach makes it very clear on their website that they don't even have schmucks-with-phones in the area, and you'll get to do the service yourself, so everything comes on a scale ...

I'm in a similar boat and I work out of my garage with 5 mills and a lathe , except I retail the parts I make . The last time I needed a tormach part it took a week to get an answer to the part I wanted (call don't email) , then another week to get the part . My novakon is basically an orphan so it can easily get worse than the 1 week haas spindle , but it is still unacceptable for an industrial machine
The nice thing about the tormach is that there is no rocket science to repairing them .