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New Haas Desktop CNC Mill, surely some mistake?

Rob L

Aluminum
Joined
Nov 5, 2019
Location
Staffordshire, UK
So this video just popped up on the youtube home page, Haas desktop CNC I thought, maybe something like those tiny Kern desktop CNC mills I keep seeing on the web...

YouTube

How disspointed I was, I can't help but feel they've really aimed too low with this product, in the age of 3D printers surely a machine for educational use needs to be able to mill at least soft metals to have any hope of getting an 'oooh' from people of education age.

Also I wonder if they forgot when April fools is :nutter: I am genuinly struggling to think this is a serious product release.
 
Someone posted about that machine a few months ago, and I think the reaction was the same as yours - it's a mistake.

Too little functionality for the price, even if just a training tool.
 
They will sell quite a few of these. They are small, relatively inexpensive, and don't need a shop space. You can put them in a classroom.

My college had a lab full of small Intellitek benchtop CNC mills and lathes for teaching G-code on. The real machine shop was either Haas or old manual machines; running the same control on both would have made things much easier on the shop teacher.

The community college machining program has a few of the Haas and Fanuc simulators (Control Simulator. This is much better, as it actually does something.
 
The community college machining program has a few of the Haas and Fanuc simulators (Control Simulator. This is much better, as it actually does something.
Being able to actually do something with a simulator is a definate plus, I'll give them that.

In the US do schools/colleges etc actually use the CNC equipment? In the UK the general impression is schools wasting tax payer money on machines and never using them. The high school I went to bought a little Roland CNC thingie that seemed to have a similar capability and stopped using it very quickly because they were scared of breaking it and how much it'd cost to repair/replace, then again when I went through the school system 'manufacturing' was a dirty word and everyone was pushed towards worthless degrees and office jobs.
 
The machine's fine.

It's a stepping stone for students in a CNC class. Crash the desktop machine and forget about running the VF2.

There are idiots in every class, every semester. Gotta weed them out somehow. Don't punish the poor VF2.
 
Being able to actually do something with a simulator is a definate plus, I'll give them that.

In the US do schools/colleges etc actually use the CNC equipment? In the UK the general impression is schools wasting tax payer money on machines and never using them. The high school I went to bought a little Roland CNC thingie that seemed to have a similar capability and stopped using it very quickly because they were scared of breaking it and how much it'd cost to repair/replace, then again when I went through the school system 'manufacturing' was a dirty word and everyone was pushed towards worthless degrees and office jobs.
In my engineering tech program we used the VF-2 a little in Manufacturing Processes, and a lot in Advanced Manufacturing Processes.

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In the US do schools/colleges etc actually use the CNC equipment? In the UK the general impression is schools wasting tax payer money on machines and never using them. The high school I went to bought a little Roland CNC thingie that seemed to have a similar capability and stopped using it very quickly because they were scared of breaking it and how much it'd cost to repair/replace, then again when I went through the school system 'manufacturing' was a dirty word and everyone was pushed towards worthless degrees and office jobs.

At the high school level that I've seen/heard about, it's mostly 3D printers and old Bridgeports.

At the community college (vocational school) level. They definitely do use the CNC equipment. My school has a very large selection, including Haas, robodrills, old-school pallet changing horizontal, wire EDM, etc. That's on top of the manual mill/lathe section.

At the university level, my MechE program in the US had a decent machine shop. We all had to do some manual machining and used the benchtop CNC mills/lates to learn CNC and g-code. There were also a couple of Haas mills for actual work, making stuff for professors, grad students, and senior projects. I don't recall my MechE program in England having as much hands-on machining, but I'd already taken that class in the US, so I wouldn't have had to take that class in England anyways. OTOH, Sussex had much better hands on equipment in other fields (e.g. a working late 19th-century steam engine), so I imagine it varies a lot school to school.
 
It's gonna have to be < $3000 to compete with the other hobby routers

I don't agree, it's a different market than the hobbyist market. This has a few things going for it:

1) fully enclosed
2) it will just work. You won't be trying to get a commodity desktop computer running with some weird software
3) it will behave like a real CNC machine. I just had a thread about weird behavior on a router running WinCNC.
4) the guys running the machine shop already know how to run a Haas.
5) the school probably has an account with the Haas distributor. Paperwork at public colleges is a giant pain.
6) the e-stop and interlocks will actually be designed properly. ShopSabre, which is a step above the good hobby stuff, still does a terrible job integrating the e-stop. It's single channel, no safety relay, and they didn't even wire it into the VFD's STO circuit.


The intellitek mills I used in university aren't cheap. They were $10k or so a while ago.
 
I see it as a upside ,, Its meant to be a learning tool and I think its better they learn on a "REAL" control than some little china made router with a PC based POS control...

A lot of my local schools are putting there shop classes back in and I think we all need to do what we can to support them .
 
I think its a very focused product, it's not meant to make stuff, its simply to teach the controller.

Low power requirements, enclosed and safe will tick all the school/training facility boxes.

I can't see any one student spending 6 months using it, but I can imagine a high volume of students using it as a check point between theory and being let loose on a big boy VF
 
It's not a bad idea. It's cheaper to have a student start there then crash a VMC. I bet these will also take over at Skills USA, since it has a legit control. Outside of a learning environment, I don't see a use for them.
 
I took a course on a Fanuc 3000C back in 1978. All we had was a control turning a couple of servos. Not a lot to be learned there. Many years later we now have several Haas mills and simulator controls. If this product was close or equal to the price of a simulator control, then it's not such a bad idea. However if the price gets up there (I've yet to see a price so far) then it falls flat.
 
I can see it in educational use, for all the reasons mentioned above. And schools aren't always all that budget sensitive.

But for the hobby and garage market, seems far less likely. It looks like a tiny, cheap Chinese router, not a mill, with severely limited cutting capabilities. If it's $10K, you can get a very serious 2' x 3' router and have $ left for tooling. Plus learning the Haas controller is not going to be an attraction to that crowd.
 
This is a Steve Jobs revisit obviously. If you put the junkiest version of a Mac in all the classrooms, what is the net result?

The Haas control is very easy to learn on. I appreciate that, but it's not the only thing on the market (don't tell Gene). Honestly it doesn't even need to function mechanically. You could use the 3D graphics function with the same result. They aren't learning speeds and feeds whilst cutting plastic and wax.
 
So this video just popped up on the youtube home page, Haas desktop CNC I thought, maybe something like those tiny Kern desktop CNC mills I keep seeing on the web...

YouTube

How disspointed I was, I can't help but feel they've really aimed too low with this product, in the age of 3D printers surely a machine for educational use needs to be able to mill at least soft metals to have any hope of getting an 'oooh' from people of education age.

Also I wonder if they forgot when April fools is :nutter: I am genuinly struggling to think this is a serious product release.

If it is aimed at schools the lessons will not be long enough to setup and run a larger machine.

Grand daughter came home with some keyrings that she cnc’d at school, she was over the moon.

Until then they had made items from sheet plastic that was cut by hand and heat bent into shape, following year they moved up a level and started to use the newer machines.

This was a few years ago and she is 16 now, so it must have been 12 or 13 year olds?

I seem to remember schools In the UK were using Denford and Emco cnc machines.
 








 
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