Joe
You will not have to sweat those tolerances with most brands, probably not even with some of the Taiwanese newcomers either.
Now, just noting a few things about My experience with the Makino vs. Brother, I'll let others chime in with
their preference of another brand.
As a Brother user, you will find that threading will be far more reliable compared to the 50's.
Things you wouldn't think of auto-threading into today will be a non issue.
At the same time, if you're like me and prefer to thread into the kerf without ever traveling back to a re-thread position, threading
manually is a single button click away ( you will not need to change the threading mode in the control )
You WILL still break wires! Do not let anyone ever tell you that their machine does not get wire breaks!
But!
You will have a lot less of them, specially the ones that make you
, then
, later
and finally
!
Selecting the proper tech is much more specific than the Brother, and at the same time is also far far more accurate right out of the gate.
On the Brother you likely flew by the seat of your pants for skim settings, relying on past experience and notes.
You will not have to do much, if any of that. Select the proper tech, add the number of skims and the tech will be populated with settings that
produces the accuracy required without too much measuring in-between.
Rough cut speeds should be about 20% faster with brass, possibly 30% with the right coated wire.
Skims may or may not see much of speed advantages other than perhaps from the fact that the rough cut corners are cleaner
and the walls are straighter.
Get used to being able to talk next to the machine!
The Brothers were incredibly nice and rugged designs, but damm those pumps really needed a sound booth around them!
If you normally - or only sometimes even - rely on the BACK button on the Brother .... well, forget about it.
New machines apparently ain't got that one nice feature.
Your backplot graphics are also improved greatly, and you will see and know exactly what's happening, even in tapered modes.
Get used to much more settings to dick with.
And I mean a LOT MORE SETTINGS!!!
Programming is as simple as the Brother.
That was one of my main issue with machine selection.
The Brother had only a few specific codes, otherwise it was plain vanilla G-code.
With the Makino, it's the same. Depending on how you write programs, converting from one to the other will take editing only a few lines.
I can literally modify a Brother program to run on the Makino in less than 2 minutes by hand, usually right on the control itself.
I will forever miss the Brother's wire chopper!!!
I absolutely love the Makino's workoffset usage.
The typical G92 work-set as used on the Brother is still available, but I now much prefer the Plane Jane G54, G55 ...
It does not have the G261/G262 like the 50A, but more than makes up for it by the way you can switch between the gazillion available workoffsets.
Did I say there are much more setting to dick with?
Well, there are much much more to describe, but I think it'd be better to answer specific questions so feel free to fire away.