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Hurco owners, chime in please?

Djstorm100

Cast Iron
Joined
Jul 26, 2014
Location
Richmond
How has your experience been with Hurco? Looking at a VMX32 I'm looking heavily at a Doosan 4500s but I need to start making a plan B and C in case the Doosan dealer deal falls through. Doosan Dealer doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy. Back up plan is Haas... I know I know, don't shoot me.

I'm trying to future proof with whatever I get. The Hurco dealer, I'm not worried about support/ service. A good friends of mine is good friends with a few of the guys at the Hurco dealer.

I cut mostly brass and alum. However I have a few products in the design that will benefit from being made out of 303/304 SS in stead of alum. Again future proofing, I do job work shop as well and your basic steels I would like to cut efficiently as possible. I understand there's a lot of unknown variables in that respect.
 
We bought our first "new" Machining center at IMTS last year a Hurco vm10i I have no formal training In CNC or machining never worked in a machine shop. With that said I do not use the conversational programing only cad/cam and this machine has done everything I have asked of it and more. I know the limitation is me not the machine. We are a design Fabrication and installation company of large audio video systems for sports bars so most the the stuff we make is of our own design but have started to take on job shop work and have no problems with any material. Hope this helps
 
If you do much job shop work, then I think the Hurco conversational control would be a real advantage if you are going to program at the control.

If you are still going to do everything in your existing CAD/CAM, then the advantage goes away.

The only downside to the Hurco would be that it has a lower resale price in comparison to say a Haas of similar size. The Doosan would likely be in a similar situation depending on geographic area and strength of the dealer.
 
The Hurcos are not high quality machines but they are quick and capable. Every new machine I've seen had a bad spindle or way cover or some bad plumbing or something right from the factory. The ball screws are sloppy from the factory - you should see the amount of compensation being applied on new machines with scales. We ran the VMX machines so I don't know how you'd cut accurately on a VM, but one of the programmers had been using them for a long time with very good results, so...

I HATE the controls. They handle certain things very different than any other controller and the workflow is pretty dumb. I don't like FANUC either, but I really didn't like the Winmax controller. The only person in the shop who used the conversational or DXF/3D import was a toolmaker who hadn't touched a CNC since the 1980s. He learned it and then it was never used again.

Chip control SUCKED. The Hurco branded chip conveyors were absolute trash.

But bottom line is they are capable and relatively inexpensive. Just make sure you run some test cuts before you sign off on the machine.
 
I don’t do conversational...well that’s a lie I did it twice showing a friend the machine (facing a part).

The conveyor is scrap style, don’t know how I feel about this. Just unsure if hurco. But I do not question the service at all. If they sold Doosan or Haas I wouldn’t be posting this


I’m looking a a vmx42 and it’s the same price as Doosan
 
A few years ago Hurco slipped a quotation in with a contract and rather than purchasing order the regular VF2-SS's that we got each month the order got sent to Hurco. They show up and I am absolutely furious. Two VM20i's in the parking lot with no chance of sending them back. I sucked it up and went ahead and made a spot for them in the back so not to disturb the rows of Haas. Right off the bat, nothing but problems. Day one, I'm walking through the shop and I can feel this vibration through my boots so I began looking to see if one the the Haas had dropped a spindle. I get back to the Hurco's and they are running the break-in cycles and it sounds and feels like its going to come apart like a Chinese wrist watch.

I'm talking to the tech's and they are assuring me that's how all Hurco's sound. I start looking around in the machine and had to wonder what moron would paint the inside of a machine dark grey and only one light!?! It was like working in a cave with a flashlight from the 40's. No side windows and the front windows have so much lattice it was next to impossible to see what was going on.

The Renishaw system didn't even have shielded cable, only 6mm rubber coated wiring that lasted about a week. The electrical cabinet fans where not factory installed and rather than take the doors of to cut the holes the tech used a cut off wheel on a side grinder and filled the cabinets with metallic dust.

And finally,,,,Spindle power. Those POS don't have enough torque to pull a greasy string out of a cats ass. They claim 60 ft pounds spindle torque, I'm thinking more like 20 at the most. We started running the numbers and the Hurco's were actually costing us money verses the Haas output so basically after three or four weeks they got mothballed. In my video they were not even suitable for prep work such as just squaring blocks up for the Haas. Why they would put a big plus spindle on something so weak amazes me.

Here's the vid I made just trying to square up material.

YouTube


And some pics of what it's like inside......

IMAG0037.jpgIMAG0038.jpg
 
About how long ago was this?

I'm biased but I have not seen the quality issues that are being mentioned and I have seen a considerable number taken out of the crate. As far as the spindle horsepower, the Haas is rated at 30hp and the Hurco is rated at 20hp. I would not consider that any type of comparison.

One thing I have noticed is that if a shop is using a Hurco and using the conversational control, they will have quite a few Hurcos. Seems to be a love hate thing.

I would go by the dealer support. There really is not much difference in the builds between the machine tool builders. They are all building to a price point. Servo motors and servo controllers are usually all from one of the major quality suppliers.

Hurco does offer better options then the cheap conveyor so you can do better than the cheap one.

One thing that Hurco tends to do is to have a higher max table weight, allowing for heavier parts. This does come at the cost that the table axis speeds are a little slower. At the same time they tend to have a wider vertical column which increases the rigidity on heavy cuts.

No matter what you do, make sure to match the machine characteristics to your work and buy from a dealer that you trust. A good dealer can resolve a bad situation. A bad dealer can make even the best machine a difficult experience.
 
Not sure if this is going to be helpful, but we have 3 Doosans. I don't have a single complaint. I believe they come with a 3 year warranty, but if our experience is typical you won't even use it. Our oldest went over 4 years before there was a single issue. And it was minor. We also have a Takumi (which is built by Hurco) and while it's a pretty decent machine too, we've had more issues with it then all 3 Doosan's combined. So I guess I can't really comment on the quality of Doosan service because we just don't need it.

Dan
 
About how long ago was this?

This was early 2016.

As one poster said "20 HP verses the Haas 30HP" yes that is true,,, but Hurco claims 60 FP torque for 1 minute verses Haas 62 FP torque for 30 seconds at 200%. Funny how so many laugh at "Haas power".

You don't have to take my word for it, just stick your head inside a Hurco and you will see how crappy they are. sucks to have to take 8 screws out to clean one side of the machine verses just slide the window up.
 
We have an '06 VM2 and '14 VM20i. They are decent. You are more so paying for the conversational rather than a great piece of iron. That being said, (in my small experience with Haas) they are not any worse as far as the iron goes.

For simple parts, quick mill an edge, drill tap few holes. You can't beat the speed of programming on the control. We also run Gibbscam through them, not doing any crazy profiling, it handles the code no problem at all.

Reliability: They are windows based, we've had some issues with the computer and boards. We don't hardly do prevent maintenance, and considering that, I think they have been very reliable.

The new grey body styles, are a black hole for light, like mentioned before.

Spindles are noisy compared to our other machines, but they run fine.

My opinion, they are ok. I wouldn't want to get another one, I think there's better machines in the class that they are priced at. But if you got a GREAT price on one, you'll be fine.
 
Looking at a VMX32----I'm trying to future proof with whatever I get. Again future proofing

Hurco does not support old machines, this is widely known. Not poor support, or expensive support. None.

Last I knew, Hurco would not do free phone support.

In the future you will be on your own with Hurco.

Doosan still provides parts and service for their earliest machines (Daewoo) as does Fanuc.


We had to buy a turret encoder for a Puma 15 at about age 22(not me the machine). The encoder was no longer made. Doosan came up with a kit to retrofit some other encoder on there. Would Hurco do that? can you get any parts for a 92 vintage Hurco from Hurco?
 
I did have my heart set on a Doosan but due to a rep, looking like plan be (Haas) will be implemented. This is my first new VMC, before was a tormach and a old Mini Mill that I scrapped. Oh well, crap happens.
 
We have Hurco TMM10, VM-1, four VM30i, VMX30Ui (5 axis). They are decent machines, stuff does break once in a while but we have great support in SoCal.

When I started I had no CAM experience so we got TMM10/VM-1 for conversational control.

When we needed more machines I kept getting Hurcos because the day machine is installed is the day we start running parts on it. No learning curve for setup guys and operators. We try to standardize everything. Pretty much any 3 axis program can run on any machine with few exceptions.

We switched to programming with Solidcam so conversational is not even used any more.

Now for the ugly, do not get the scraper conveyor if you are running aluminum. Chips will float, block spillway and flood the floor.

Spindle is ok but the damn belts suck. I pretty much gave up running above 8k RPM. As soon as belt stretches a little it will vibrate bad enough to affect surface finish. That is a big limitation, I think they might be going to direct drive but I am not sure.

Lights... Make sure you get the second light option for the left side, otherwise it's too dark.

Leaks... Let's just say they have leaks. Couple machines had them on day one and they had support spend a day inside the machine to find and seal it.

Crash tolerance.. we didn't have any serious crashes, probably the worst was part getting sucked out of fixture into a face mill and a few 3/4" carbide endmills running into the side of a vise. Cutters were trash but spindle was fine.

Our first machines are about 13yo and Hurco is still supporting them.

Having said all that I am sure there are better options out there but Hurcos have been great for us. We went from two Hurcos to now 7 and they are running 24/5. If we need to expand again we will stick with Hurcos.

Alex


Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
 
At least here in the UK Hurco will support old machines.

They don't stock control parts for the very old controls, but they will support if they can.

About ten years ago we had a really old workhorse built in 1986, it lost the power supply for the control. Hurco sent an engineer who converted it to work on a new power supply from one of their current controls. Ran fine for years after that until we finally scrapped it.

About three years ago they did the same on our 1992 BMC25, which is still on our floor making parts. About a year ago I replaced all the thrust bearings. I didn't want to pull it out of service for too long so I phoned Hurco to ask for the part numbers of the bearings. They answered the phone, gave me the numbers, and offered to come and fit them if I wanted.

Our two other Hurcos are much newer machines.

They have all been pretty good to us and owe us nothing.

They have some flaws, as aokun already posted the chip removal on our VMX64 does very poorly with aluminium. We haven't had any trouble with belt vibration on that machine, but it's a 50 taper spindle with 8k max, and our other Hurco is an integrated motor spindle.

The windows HMI can be flaky sometimes on the control, it likes to crash occasionally when loading programs from usb drives, but otherwise is solid. I've been trying for years to get around to networking them in order to see if they are more stable that way.
 
We have all of our Hurcos on the network. I have a Synology NAS that has a folder for all posted programs and Hurcos see it just fine. We just generate gcode from solidcam to this folder and open it from Hurco. I also have Synology automatically backing up this folder to OneDrive so that we always have a back up.
Alex
 
We have all of our Hurcos on the network. I have a Synology NAS that has a folder for all posted programs and Hurcos see it just fine. We just generate gcode from solidcam to this folder and open it from Hurco. I also have Synology automatically backing up this folder to OneDrive so that we always have a back up.
Alex

Do you ever have the control lock up when loading programs this way?
 
Never during loading a program. Had control crash randomly after running for about 4-5 months straight but it shut down gracefully and we were able to pick up from same spot after reboot. All of our machines are WinMax 9 or later.
Alex
 








 
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