Hi All,
Thanks for the amazing site and forum!
I am a physics prof, at onetime a (very) amateur machinist (some of us experimental types do learn how to jam up a bridgeport in college). Fortunately they don't let me run the machines anymore, but at the moment I am in charge of buying a VMC and its tooling for our student/faculty/research shop. Our budget is probably max $40K, but that likely has to include a decent set of tooling as well. We need something at least 24" travel in X, so we are looking at used Haas VF-2, new TM-1P, new Sharp 2412 (I don't have a price on the Sharp yet but expect one soon), new Hurco VM1 (the latter starts pretty high however, so I don't know if we can make it). I guess other used machines might cut it as well, I have just not been able to make much headway with all the used machines out there, and we want to stay with something less than 10 yrs old as well. Fadals come up a lot, but the older controllers make me a bit gunshy, and there seems to be a lot of mixed press on them.
We are getting a great educational deal on Mastercam, so we really want to have DNC capability, and a lot of our machining is specialty parts that will be transferred into Mastercam from solidworks or mechanical desktop. (I am pretty sure we will also want to have a 4th axis ready even if we can't buy the tooling for it just yet).
We will also be hiring a CNC machinist/instrument builder to manage the machine and shop (this is a nice career for somebody ready to move out of the manufacturing world)--but we don't have anybody yet or he would be writing this...
I have two questions:
(1) What machine would you buy (and why) if you were in my shoes, used or new?
(2) What is the basic set of tooling that we should be pricing out along with the machine to make sure that we can actually use it when we do get one?