Mazak mill offerings

[70olds]

As I surf through the forums I see a lot of people mentioning Mazak lathes or mills and lathes, but it seems that most Mazak mill users are that way because they have the lathes as well. It doesn't seem too common for people to own just their mills and use another brand of lathe. How does everyone feel about their mills? We program all offline so Mazatrol does just about nothing for me in the decision making process. Are there any major upsides/downsides on their mills, specifically horizontals? They seem to have some decent ease-of-use features, but I don't want to sacrifice the machine for the control (no offense HAAS). Thanks.

 

[boosted]

Mazak makes pretty good premium big (1 meter and up) mills and big 5 axis mills. The big 5 axis horizontals (Integrex e-V's etc...) are pretty solid.

I have a lot of experience with the HC and HCN series, and they are pretty "meh". Not necessarily bad machines, but I see no reason to buy them unless you really like your local Mazak team. I don't have personal experience with the HCR.

Mazak's strongest selling point is that they make a solution for everything. If you only need one type of machine, they probably aren't going to be the best.

*edit* Also, I'm not really a fan of any of Mazak's "commodity" machines. They are hyper-obsessed with competing with HAAS, and they just can't get it right. There seems to be a gimmicky new 40x20 VMC every few years, and they have all of these legacy Mazak products that compete with each other for that market.

 

[Vancbiker]

…….The big 5 axis horizontals (Integrex e-V's etc...) are pretty solid……

Not in my experience. I watched an e1060v8 regularly under perform in milling when compared to some other brand 40 taper HMCs adjacent to it.

 

[boosted]

I watched an e1060v8 regularly under perform in milling when compared to some other brand 40 taper HMCs adjacent to it.

I guess it's all about perspective. Mazak's spindles absolutely underwhelm across the board. They also make so many machines with so many options. I have seen many, many instances over the years of shops that hate machines that were just optioned out totally wrong for their application. You can probably commiserate there.

 

[CNC Hacker]

Not in my experience. I watched an e1060v8 regularly under perform in milling when compared to some other brand 40 taper HMCs adjacent to it.

I've seen you post this before, and I don't discount your personal experience, but there are dozens of vertical integrexes in my area that exclusively run aerospace super alloys all day long without breaking a sweat. I've personally buried an 8" face mill in steel on an e-1060 Ramtec one with no drama.

To the OP's question, Mazak has been building horizontal mills for a long, long time. The Oguichi factory in Japan only builds HMCs because the demand is so high. If you're looking at a modern one with a Smooth or Matrix control it'll happily take G code.

 

[Vancbiker]

I guess it's all about perspective. Mazak's spindles absolutely underwhelm across the board. They also make so many machines with so many options. I have seen many, many instances over the years of shops that hate machines that were just optioned out totally wrong for their application. You can probably commiserate there.

Yes, and the lack of any real effort by Mazak to try to figure out why it performed so poorly in comparison to machines, that based in specs, should not perform as well or better only added to the pain and disappointment with the machine. Gage length of tool assembly was the real determining factor in how it would mill. If you could keep the gage length below 8” it would usually do ok and under 6” was always fine. Go beyond 8” and it got really noodley. Of course on a large 5 axis with large parts, needing to go over 8” gage is frequently necessary.

 

[camhead420]

We have had two HMC's, I was very disappointed with both. The lathe, a QT20 has been great. It seems much more solid that the mills.
They will run g-code programs, but to run some of the
(nice) functions only exist in mazatrol. I found them to be almost disposable, run em and trash em.

 

[70olds]

Thanks for all of your input. The replies were sort of what I was expecting.