sansbury
Aluminum
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2013
- Location
- Boston, Mass.
The suspect: MATSUURA 4 H PC11 CNC Horizontal Machining Center -HMC # | eBay
I have something of a side project going where it would be really nice to have a 40-tool HMC with a pallet pool to play with. I say "play," because this is really more of a research project than anything else, and I wouldn't have customer orders or other bill-paying activities lined up that would suffer when it goes down.
I'm willing to take the risk of the control dying because I will likely want to retrofit it with LinuxCNC in order to have complete control/hackability of the machine for my own purposes. I know that's a few hundred hours easy plus some money for PC and interface hardware (I have experience with the system and am very comfortable with software configuration and build) and I'm OK with that.
What would make this a pointless boondoggle for me would be if I bought the machine, spent easily as much money rigging it in and wiring it up in my space, then spent a hundred or two hours retrofitting the control, and then find I need to replace a bunch of mechanical or electromechanical parts that cost 4-5 figures each. At that point, I'd be better off buying something newer and less beat up.
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to get a sense of is, if a qualified inspection found the machine to be basically sound and in good enough condition for my immediate needs (think ~+/- .001" tolerances with no concern for speed), other than the control dying, how much risk do I have of ending up with a pile of scrap iron due to failures that I can't solve with sweat and elbow grease?
Thanks in advance, including for the people who will tell me this is the worst idea since New Coke (around same time this machine was made, I think)
I have something of a side project going where it would be really nice to have a 40-tool HMC with a pallet pool to play with. I say "play," because this is really more of a research project than anything else, and I wouldn't have customer orders or other bill-paying activities lined up that would suffer when it goes down.
I'm willing to take the risk of the control dying because I will likely want to retrofit it with LinuxCNC in order to have complete control/hackability of the machine for my own purposes. I know that's a few hundred hours easy plus some money for PC and interface hardware (I have experience with the system and am very comfortable with software configuration and build) and I'm OK with that.
What would make this a pointless boondoggle for me would be if I bought the machine, spent easily as much money rigging it in and wiring it up in my space, then spent a hundred or two hours retrofitting the control, and then find I need to replace a bunch of mechanical or electromechanical parts that cost 4-5 figures each. At that point, I'd be better off buying something newer and less beat up.
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to get a sense of is, if a qualified inspection found the machine to be basically sound and in good enough condition for my immediate needs (think ~+/- .001" tolerances with no concern for speed), other than the control dying, how much risk do I have of ending up with a pile of scrap iron due to failures that I can't solve with sweat and elbow grease?
Thanks in advance, including for the people who will tell me this is the worst idea since New Coke (around same time this machine was made, I think)