Thread: Machine installers, looking for Pros

Shoulda hollered a month ago, Ray. I used to be pretty good at extracting performance from unresponsive vendors and service contractors. I wonder if I still have my chops?

One handy tool is citing the lost production because of the non-availability of the machine. another is unutilized operator training. Deferred POI for a $100,000 machine is about $1200 a day. Start a tab on them. But first you need to read the various documents and a get a reading on local contract law to find the hooks you need to sink in.

Then there's always the rent-a-biker contract enforcement squad. Thirty bikers immobilizing and surrounding the contractor CEO's car in a lonely public place can be pretty impressive as they rev their engines and deliver your card.

[ 11-11-2006, 10:29 AM: Message edited by: Forrest Addy ]

Size does matter. I've plunked down eight or ten meills and small lathes etc. in a few days. We had a Mandelli or Innse gantry mill that took a year to put in and an additional two years of leveling, lasering, cussing, litigation, Indian mediators, Italy seizing some of our machines at a machine show, Wining, Dining, etc.

Traytop-

Don't tease, tell us, like Paul Harvey, "The Rest of the Story".

Might even help out Cruisin, too!

Dave

Naw! probably not. The Innse was huge. The foundation was huge. We had a track hoe digging the foundation down so far that the top of the arm was below the factory floor. I do not have the actual size of this thing but it was huge. It was installed near an outside wall. The gantry went down into pits that were probably eight or ten foot deep and the cold air from the outside wall would spill down into the pit and shrink it. It had Heidenhain scales and we had temperature compensation but did the cold air heat or warm this or that section. This was a constant variable. We did many on the fly laser shots for compensation but there was no way to know when what draft would blow in from where. You would be in the middle of a cut and we would get a skew error between the collumns. It was a mess. We had put X amount of money down and the machine was down for X amount of time and it was either them or us working on it and Everyone above us were pissed and when any of us were sent to work on it, it was like a prison sentemce because an actual repair was impossible and by the fact you were involved with it you knew that when any fingers needed to be pointed all you had to do was turn around and there they were. I was just a rum dummy down in the pits but the story we heard was There was a machine show in Italy where we sent a few tools and the Italian government seized them as colateral because we refused to pay for something we could not use. It was literally years before we could get anything usable off this piece of equiptment and then it was usually huge beds that needed work once they were cut. The Innse was supposed to be the calvery which would arrive just in time. A five sided mill that you would plunk a giant casting and or weldment with leveling screw holes drilled and tapped and once miracously machined on the remaining five sides would be a finished product. It got so weird toward the end that there was actually a neutral government brought in to listen to both sides to make the actual decision. No news or knowledge was ever sent down to people at our level. All we knew was when we were anywhere near that POS, we had to have a real serious look on our face and never be seen in one place to long. Now I squirt mud with a 120PSI fire hose and wash asiatic clams, zebra mussles, and assorted Chrisscraft boat parts down an eight inch hole and am absolutely in love with what I do. John