Haas "Upgrades"

We asked Haas to install air blast systems on two mills and a hand pendant on one machine. First off, the air blast systems suck. It's a single acting Bimba cylinder with a hole thru the piston rod. The rod extends when air is applied. The whole thing is mounted on a cheesy plastic bracket that will surprise me if it lasts a year.

Haas also convinced us to "upgrade" to newer motherboards. The new display screens are less intuitive than the old format and the position readouts are so small I can't read them.

As for what's improved with the new board, I'm still looking for it. Apparently it is some new safety feature that came out as a result of some jury handing out a settlement to some operator who should have received a Darwin award.

If Haas recommends the upgrade my advice it to just say no. The program edit screen has already revealed a bug that makes program blocks disappear.

I'm not as impressed with Haas as I was three years ago.

I have to wonder sometimes if there is an unrecognized iteration of Moore's law that shows the trend in the the number of f'k ups to be rising at some sort of exponential rate? Everyone expects the stuff to get better as more features are added, but that just multiplies the number of ways crap goes wrong, and sometimes the bugs just lay there hidden for years.