Michael Moore
Titanium
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2004
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
Yesterday a friend of mine told me he was surprised to learn that not all CNC mills run linear scales on the axes to allow the actual table position to be known. He was even more suprised to find that some mills like my Tree run the encoder with a belt between it and the ball screw. I informed him that seemed to work pretty well though many VMCs would be more likely to have the servo motor mounted on the end of the ball screw and so eliminate the belt and that linear scales looks to be a "high end" type of thing to find on a mill.
I went to the Haas site and found that on the VF1 with a MSRP of $47K the linear scales are a $10K option. I told him that my impression was that probably wasn't purchased by many people as the rotary encoders are "good enough" for most work. It looked like Fadal and Sharp also had the linear scales as an option, not a standard feature.
Does Haas actually sell many linear encoders upgrades? It seems like many people might instead take that extra 20-25% and buy a nicer base machine that had a bit more accuracy to start with.
cheers,
Michael
I went to the Haas site and found that on the VF1 with a MSRP of $47K the linear scales are a $10K option. I told him that my impression was that probably wasn't purchased by many people as the rotary encoders are "good enough" for most work. It looked like Fadal and Sharp also had the linear scales as an option, not a standard feature.
Does Haas actually sell many linear encoders upgrades? It seems like many people might instead take that extra 20-25% and buy a nicer base machine that had a bit more accuracy to start with.
cheers,
Michael