Best starter cnc

[Stirling]

You should specify what type of machining you want to do before asking what machine.
Personally I’d say go get a job at a shop for 6 month. Get paid to get educated, better than a costly mistake.

Budget of 40,000. CNC only? Is that all? $10,000 in tooling, 30,000 for machine. Get a haas tm IMO. New, warranty, not powerful enough to demolish itself. Runs single phase and can be moved with a pallet jack.
Tormach is ok, but the mx is way to much $$ imo. Who would ever buy it over a tm unless they wanna pack it pc by pc downstairs?

 

[thewynner98]

You should specify what type of machining you want to do before asking what machine.
Personally I’d say go get a job at a shop for 6 month. Get paid to get educated, better than a costly mistake.

Budget of 40,000. CNC only? Is that all? $10,000 in tooling, 30,000 for machine. Get a haas tm IMO. New, warranty, not powerful enough to demolish itself. Runs single phase and can be moved with a pallet jack.
Tormach is ok, but the mx is way to much $$ imo. Who would ever buy it over a tm unless they wanna pack it pc by pc downstairs?

While I agree with the job I cant find one that pays even close to what Mcdonalds does. Im not personally willing to stoop that low for somewhat skilled labor.

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[Stirling]

A dollar an hour is cheaper (aka more money in your pocket) than loosing $20,000 in tooling and 6 months frustration and your time, just a consideration.

Another consideration is if the pay for a machinist is below mc Donald’s, why the heck would you wanna tool up to compete against that? May as well thrown the money at those local shops and pick up your finished product.
Pay for a seat of your preferred CAD software and just send them the print for your product you want manufactured en mass. Or is it hit for in house specialty stuff? Again, probably cheaper to toss them the print

If your planning on competing as a jobber you have likely already lost if their labour is that cheap.

I’m sounding like a prick, and I’m sorry, but jobber is cutthroat if your not in a big boom. And if wages are that low. Your not.
My thoughts anyways

 

[thewynner98]

A dollar an hour is cheaper (aka more money in your pocket) than loosing $20,000 in tooling and 6 months frustration and your time, just a consideration.

Another consideration is if the pay for a machinist is below mc Donald’s, why the heck would you wanna tool up to compete against that? May as well thrown the money at those local shops and pick up your finished product.
Pay for a seat of your preferred CAD software and just send them the print for your product you want manufactured en mass. Or is it hit for in house specialty stuff? Again, probably cheaper to toss them the print

If your planning on competing as a jobber you have likely already lost if their labour is that cheap.

I’m sounding like a prick, and I’m sorry, but jobber is cutthroat if your not in a big boom. And if wages are that low. Your not.
My thoughts anyways

Im not likely gonna throw that much away. I have cnc experience albeit self taught. I only break stuff once in a blue moon. I dont think the jobber work is that tight just that cnc is one of the few jobs in my area there isnt a lot of turnover for. I have cad/cam software already and have a home built mach 3 cnc. I dont break end mills or scrap parts but Its too slow at only 1200rpm spindle speed and its not repeatable. Ive been running this machine for 6 months already and have a good idea of work offsets tooling feeds and speeds etc.... I also don't know how tight the jobber work is or even how to get into it which is partially what I need input for and advice on. Im familiar with how to get work wrenching as thats been my primary income since i was 15 but machine work is new territory.

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[taiwanluthiers]

I don't know how it is in your country but in Taiwan it's tight too. I know a job shop who makes a run of a thousand or so of a simple part, basically an extrusion that has 2 holes drilled and tapped on each side. Simple operation. Pay is 30 cents per part, customer provides the material. I don't even know how the guy make ends meet because the two machines he has costs about 60,000 dollars each, not to mention upkeep for the machine, keeping the lights on, and paying himself (it's a one man job shop). Then some parts he machine breaks end mills all the time because the provided material has embedded junk in it which breaks end mills even though it's just mild steel. For the record the guy works his ass off and I've seen him still on the project almost a month later. It's worse than sweat shop labor! You get paid better working retail/fast food.

Don't buy a CNC machine if your objective is to be a job shop because seriously, at least in Taiwan there is a job shop around every corner, and if you don't do it cheap thousands of other will do it cheaper. Like for example Xometry pays peanuts for the job and at least from Taiwan we'd have to pay money to work because the costs involved and the requirement (such as the part must arrive in less than a week from Taiwan to Germany) does not work out financially. That's if you aren't getting rejected parts too. Good for hobbyist who wants to transition into doing it professionally but it's not a sustainable business model for keeping the lights on.

Get a CNC machine if you have your own product and needs the machine to produce it. That's the only way for the machine to pay itself and you getting paid a good wage. Otherwise might as well get a job somewhere or do it as a hobby.

 

[Kalispel]

We bought two new CNC machines with zero machining experience. We did not even know how to turn them on. Our plan was never to go into the job shop market because we knew we had no knowledge or skill to compete. We bought them for flexibility so we could make what we wanted, when we wanted it. Jobbing parts out is inflexible when designing and prototyping.

After looking at the options, we bought a Haas VF6SS with a trunnion and a DS30Y. We picked Haas purely because of the marketing and price. They seemed to be fully featured and we could figure out how to configure and price them without a salesman in the middle. The sales guys and their quoting rituals are what unsold other options. We bought the Haas machines during one of their promotions and got a nice deal on them. The huge number of Haas how-to videos was the other factor in our choice.

We do know CAD and bought a CAM system. We plugged it all in and promptly learned what we didn’t know - everything about machining. It took us six months to get confident with the operation of the machines and another year to learn how to machine well enough to expect success on the first run of a new part. We used only the mill at first because the lathe was overwhelming and seemed risky to learn on. In that period, we collected at least $30k worth of tooling.

Today, we could not function without the machines. We use the lathe more than the mill. We use the lathe as a 4-axis bar-fed mini-mill. It runs unattended. We rarely use the trunion and have parked it back in the box.

Knowing what I know now, the lathe was a great choice and we will buy another ST30Y. We don’t use the dual chuck much.

We will buy a big old used gantry mill. We mill mostly steel and we don’t need the high speed spindle we have today. We use every inch of the VF6 and bigger but slower would be fine for us.

We are looking at making a couple small parts in volume. We developed them on the Haas and will probably buy Brother mills with high speed tool changes if we go forward. We are also pricing two VF2s with robots. The lowest cycle time wins.

The Haas machines have been good. We basically learned to use them on YouTube. We get excellent dimensional repeatability. Their service has been questionable to poor. It depends on the tech.

This was the most expensive learning of my lifetime. Figure a half million dollars and two years. It was only doable because we could pay the bills with other activities. If we had not done it, we would not be good at it. We could have hired an experienced person but we would also inherit all of their biases and never have learned as much as we have.

We are now as good as we need to be to do what we started out to do. Our capabilities seem better than many local shops based on what I see. Still, we won’t take on job shop work — too much risk for too little reward.

 

[Stirling]

If you don’t think youll loose $20,000 in 6 months of jobber work I encourage you to re evaluate. Please. Please please.
If your a $30/hour guy, starting from nowhere. Never being in the trade. $30x10hx6dx8weeks=$14,400 in wages your not gonna earn in 2 months.
That’s simply setup time to get the shop going, some sales calls. A few jobs that you hope to make money on.
Add in the equipment depreciation and some scrapped tools and metal.

That does not even Include operational costs.
I’m just being realistic for your benefit.

Work on it at night while working for someone else. Better yet don’t spend a dime and do 2 months for someone else. Otherwise it’s just as bad as a $40,000 loan for an arts degree.

I’m not saying don’t try. By all means do! I work at my home garage jobbing and CNC production of my own product. Without my own product I would be sunk. Jobbing sucks. It sucks even worse only having CNC and low “on the shelf” material inventory.
And I work in a busy oil town!

Go for it. Just get your toe wet before you jump in with both feet is all I’m saying.

If you only want CNC. And your gun ho, haas tm-2 and tl-2. Easy choice.
Cheap. Large capacity, single phase. Good resale.
Find out what work you get for the first year, re-evaluate your equipment as needed.
That’s what I did. Bought them used cheaply. Found out I needed a slant bed with 30” max length very quickly. Honestly did not like the tl lathe (older open style) poor chip evacuation/messy.
Later found a deal on a vf-2 that I could not turn down. Tm was working great but the vf is defiantly faster and the bigger tool changer/4th axis has helped me redo workflow for the many smaller parts I do. (For my own products)
I really cannot say enough good about a cheap used tm
Mine was the old open style. I fabbed an enclosure that was early removable for those “way to big” jobber jobs.

Either way, to make a long story short, be prepaired to loose money for a while, almost all do and many totally fail. but its very rewarding work in my opinion

 

[Garwood]

I have two pretty nice 3+1 axis VMC's, two 8" chuck 2.5" bar 2 axis lathes, a 16" chuck 4.5" hole C axis live tooled lathe and 25 years of tooling in a 7k square foot heated shop that I own 100% outright.

I won't touch job work and this is the easiest time in my life to make money doing job work.

Sure, lots of people do it, but you got one hell of a tough up hill battle to make a living doing it starting from scratch with a hobby machine.

Even if it's possible why the hell would you want to? Starting out with some hobby shit machine is like hacking a leg off before competing in a marathon.

 

[taiwanluthiers]

I seen people on youtube converting manual mills to CNC and I was wondering why.

In Taiwan you can buy used VMC class machines rather cheaply if you have the money (not sure banks will loan on it). And those VMC machines will work in a professional capacity, but a converted manual mill will not. There's a huge difference between having to sit by the machine to change tools vs. having the machine do everything for you. But job work sucks and it wouldn't even keep the lights on, and that's assuming you got the machines and everything for free.

 

[EmGo]

There's a huge difference between having to sit by the machine to change tools vs. having the machine do everything for you.

What the hell do you know ? You've never done either one. You probably couldn't do either.

Ran these to keep in practice on my previous holiday*, four tools, old Hurco with qwick-switch, while also running splines on another machine. See the box getting shipped ? They all go to customers and make money. You just have to know what you're doing. To me, a $5,000 Hurco or Tree that you own is going to be way smarter as a starter machine than anything you make payments on.

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[jackal]

Here is a haas TM mill with toolchanger

HAAS TM-2 Toolroom CNC Milling Machine, 40" X 16" X 16" Travel, Wireless Probe | eBay